Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 6. Searching PDF Files

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Finding words in open documents

• Using the Search pane

• Knowing search distinctions

• Defining document properties

• Creating search indexes

• Searching index files

• Embedding index files

Acrobat 8 continues with the search options you had available with Acrobat 7. You'll notice the Find tool and the Search pane are both present in this release; however, the Search pane has had a little cosmetic change and no longer appears nested in the previous How To pane. In Acrobat 8, you find the Search pane working as a floating window that opens on the left side of the Document pane.

You can find information contained in PDF documents either with the Find tool or the Search window for open documents. The search extends to PDFs scattered around your hard drive and all over the Internet and without the assistance of a search index. However, creating index files with Acrobat Catalog and searching the resultant index files is available to you for more sophisticated and much faster searches. In this chapter, I cover all the tools and features available in Acrobat viewers for searching through PDF files and creating and searching index files.

Setting Up the Work Environment

The Find toolbar is loaded by default when you open Acrobat. There's no real need to open the toolbar in the More Tools window if the toolbar is not present in the Toolbar Well. The toolbar automatically opens when you select a menu command or keyboard shortcut to use the Find feature. The Search ...