Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 6. Searching PDF Files

Acrobat 9 continues with the search options you had available with Acrobat 8. You'll notice the Find tool and the Search pane are both present in this release.

You can find information contained in PDF documents with the Find tool for open documents. The Search window is available when a document is open in the Document pane or when no document is open. The Search window enables you to search PDFs scattered around your hard drive 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 feature-rich and 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.

All four Acrobat viewers (Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat Standard, Adobe Acrobat Pro, and Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended) support the exact same features for searching PDF content.

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 window opens from a menu command; therefore, no special tool arrangement is needed when searching PDF documents.

For searching PDF documents you may want to load the Search tool. By default ...