klionexpert.blogg.se - Adobe pdf search tool

They cache the text and save it in a file so that subsequent Finds and Searches are faster. If you post large PDFs for your customers to download, such as catalogues or periodicals, you might want to do the same.īoth Acrobat and Reader already do something similar when you’re repeatedly hunting for terms in the same PDF. You can bet that from now on, I’ll be routinely embedding indexes in all of the larger PDFs on my hard drive. I had the same blink-of-an-eye results in Reader 8, on both platforms. This time, Acrobat took about, oh, a nanosecond to display the same 153 matches. On my late-model Compaq, Acrobat Pro 8 took 24 seconds to display the 153 matches in its Results window.Īfter embedding the index (which added 2.8 MB to the file size), and purging the Search cache (see below) to keep things fair, I ran the same search. Whoa, mama!īefore I indexed it, I ran a search (Edit> Search) for the term "blend" and timed it. This puppy tips the scales at 46.35 MB and 762 pages. It didn’t take long to index this large PDF.įor my guinea pig test file, I downloaded the InDesign CS3 "full documentation" PDF from Adobe’s Web site.

The PDF closes, and after a few seconds of watching a progress bar create the index (Figure 2), it opens up again.įigure 2.

An alert pops up, saying that Acrobat is about to save and close the document build a search index for it embed the index and reopen the document.

The resulting dialog box will tell you that the "the document does not contain an embedded index." Ignore that and click the Embed Index button.

Open the PDF in Acrobat Pro 8 and choose Advanced> Document Processing> Manage Embedded Index.

(Earlier versions of Reader and Acrobat ignore the embedded index.)Ĭool, huh? Best of all, it’s dead-simple: End users don’t have to figure out how to tell Reader to use the index during Finds and Searches, since Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 automatically use it if it’s embedded. idx files generated for each PDF’s index, or make sure that they always travel with the file. Once they’re embedded, you no longer have to keep track of the separate. And I suppose you could use Catalog to create an index of a single PDF too, though I never bothered.Īll that is still possible in Acrobat Pro 8, and the old ways of associating an index with a particular PDF still work.īut here’s Acrobat Pro 8’s new twist: Indexes are embeddable in a PDF. PDF content providers typically index a folder full of PDFs so that a single Search (Command/Control-Shift-F) can hunt down the search text in a whole collection of PDFs. The Catalog feature has been in Acrobat for several versions. We’ve been able to create indexes in Acrobat Pro for many versions now using the Catalog feature (Advanced> Document Processing> Full Text Index with Catalog) (Figure 1).įigure 1. And, since the index knows which page numbers words appear on, the end result is the same. Since the index file is much smaller, operations are lightning-quick.

Then when you Find or Search, Acrobat or Reader searches the index, not the PDF. Using Acrobat Pro, you can create a full-text index of the contents of a single PDF and (new to version 8) embed it into the PDF. The little read-out says, "Searching 342 of 575… 343 of 575… 344… 345… 346…" Two minutes later and you’re still staring at the page progression, hypnotized, waiting for a hit: "517 of 575… 518… 519… 520…"īy choosing one little command in Acrobat Pro version 8, you can put an end to this misery and instantly find things in even in the most massive of PDFs.

Acrobat (or Adobe Reader, doesn’t matter) finds the first couple of instances in a reasonable amount of time, but soon it slows to a crawl as it hits a dry patch. Your Google-ized instincts immediately reach for the Find (Command/Control-F) field to enter the word or phrase you’re looking for. Based on an article originally published in the DesignGeek e-zine.ĭoes this sound familiar? You open a huge PDF with no bookmarks and no linked TOC, and you need to quickly find the page containing the topic you’re interested in.