Viewing the search results

When Acrobat finishes doing the search (which it completes very quickly, except in the cases of huge document collections), it displays all matching files and ranks them in order of relevance in the Results list boxRelevance Ranking is the default setting in the Sort By drop-down list. You can change the sort order of the Results list box by selecting Date Modified, Filename, or Location from the Sort By drop-down list. To have Acrobat open a document in the Results list and show you the first occurrence of the search term, click the Expand button (plus sign on Windows, triangle pointing right on Mac) to display a list of occurrences of the search term as they appear in the PDF document. Acrobat creates hyperlinks out of all search terms in the Results list box. If you hover the mouse pointer over a search term, a screen tip appears, indicating the page number that the term appears on in the selected PDF document. Clicking a search term opens the PDF document in the document pane and highlights the occurrence of search term on the page in the selected PDF document. You can close the Search PDF pane, which, like all How To panes, takes up a third of your screen, so that you can more easily view the matches highlighted in the selected document. To redisplay the Search PDF pane, press Ctrl+F (Ô+F on Mac), or you can use the Search Result commands on the Acrobat menu bar. Choose Edit➪Search Results and choose either Next Document, Next Result, Previous Result, or Previous Document on the submenu. The keyboard shortcuts are listed on this submenu.

How to find phrases in PDF document

The steps for finding terms or phrases in a PDF document collection with the Search feature are as follows:

1. Choose Edit➪Search, or press Ctrl+Shift+F (Ô+Shift+F on the Mac) to open the Search PDF pane. The Search PDF pane opens.
2. Click the Use Advanced Search Options link at the bottom of the Search PDF pane and from the Look In drop-down list, choose Select Index.
3. If the index you want to use is not listed in the Available Indexes list box, click the Add button, open the folder with the PDF document collection you want to search, click the index file icon, and then click the Open button. The Select Index dialog box closes, and you return to the Index Selection dialog box.
4. Select the index you want to use for your search; deselect any index(es) you don’t want to use for your search. After you have selected only the index(es) you want to use in the search, click OK. The Index Selection dialog box closes, and you return to the Search PDF pane.
5. Enter the search term(s) or phrase in the What Word or Phrase Would You Like to Search For? text box. Remember that you can use wildcard characters for characters of which you’re uncertain in the search term or phrase.
6. Choose a search criterion (Match Exact Word or Phrase, Match Any of the Words, Match All of the Words, or Boolean Query) in the Return Results Containing drop-down list.
7. Select any of the search options (Whole Words Only, Case Sensitive, Proximity, Stemming, Search in Bookmarks, and Search in Comments) that you want to apply.
8. Click the Search button to have Acrobat search the designated index or indexes. The results are displayed in the Search Results dialog box.

Searching a Collection

After you’ve created the indexes you need to search your PDF document collections, you can use the Search feature in Acrobat 6 or Adobe Reader 6 to quickly locate key terms and phrases. Keep in mind that when you use the Search feature, Acrobat is searching for the occurrence of your terms in any of the indexed documents included in the PDF document collection. Therefore, along with specifying the search terms, you need to specify which index should be used in doing the search.
In order to be able to search collections in Adobe Reader 6 (as opposed to Acrobat 6), you must download the Full version of the program from Adobe’s Web site. The Basic version lacks the ability to search PDF files. When specifying the search terms, you can use wildcard characters. Use the asterisk (*) to indicate any number of missing characters and the question mark (?) for single missing characters. You can also use the following Boolean operators:

• NOT: Excludes documents in the collection that contain a certain word or phrase, such as NOT “Chicago”. You can also use the NOT operator by entering the ! (exclamation point) in front of the term to be excluded.
• AND: Narrows the search to documents that contain both terms, such as “Chicago” AND “New York”. When you use the AND operator, Acrobat matches a document only when it contains both terms.
• OR: Expands the search to include documents that include either search term, such as “Chicago” OR “St. Louis”. When you use the OR operator, Acrobat matches any document that contains one or the other term.

When specifying a search term, you can also include any of the following word search options:

• Whole Words Only: Limits matches to occurrences of the whole words specified in the search words or phrases.
• Case Sensitive: Limits matches in a search to the words in the document collection that exhibit a strict upper- and lowercase correspondence to the term for which you’re searching.
• Proximity: Ignores any matches unless one instance of the search term occurs within three pages of another instance of it in the documents included in the PDF document collection. For example, if you search for the phrase customer satisfaction guaranteed, Acrobat will show matches only when this phrase occurs more than once in the document and at least two occurrences are within three pages of each other.
• Stemming: Enables the Word Assistant preview (that you can use to refine searches — see the “Refining your search” section, later in this chapter) and expands matches in a search to words in the document collection that use the same word stem (so that occurrences of foremost, foreman, and foresee in the collection all match when you specify fore as the search term).
• Search in Bookmarks: Expands matches in a search to occurrences in the PDF document bookmarks.
• Search in Comments: Expands matches in a search to occurrences in the PDF document comments