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