Chapter 6. Searching PDF Files

Acrobat X continues with the search options you had available with Acrobat 9. 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.

Using the Find Toolbar

In order to use the Find toolbar, you must have a document open in the Document pane. If you have more than one document open, you can search only the active document appearing in the foreground.

Finding words in an open document can be handled in the Find toolbar. The toolbar opens when you press Ctrl/

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