Searching with Acro Reader 6.*

[jfhewitt]

I just upgraded Acrobat Reader to version 6.02. Search function works fine, except on a batch of PDF files I received from someone else. They were on a CDROM, but I copied them to my hard disk. I checked to make sure they were not read only. Is there a method of creating PDF files that make them unsearchable? I use Acrobat 5, but as I understand it, the upgraded Reader can search both Acro5 and 6 files. Any ideas?

 

[jfhewitt]

I think a little more searching might have answered my question. Obviously, Acrobat Reader won't search scanned documents...which makes it useless for many users. Why am I not surprised?

 

[Larena]

Acrobat Writer 6 has a 'Paper Capture' feature that allows you to OCR a scanned document as a hidden layer. This means that although you can still see the original scan on screen, you can make the text searchable. Unfortunately this is new in V6, so your Writer 5 won't have this feature.

 

[jfhewitt]

Thanks...I'll check it out. I have Reader 6 and Acrobat 5. The term "Acrobat Writer" is a bit confusing.

 

[Larena]

Sorry - I forgot tyhey've changed their naming conventions. It used to be Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Writer. Now it's Adobe Reader if you just need to open documents and Acrobat 6 if you need to be able to create / edit documents. So it is the product called "Acrobat 6" (ie, the one you have to pay for) that is needed in order to OCR the scanned documents.

 

[jfhewitt]

I have Acrobat 5, and as far as I know, it does not have OCR features. However, from my experience, Acrobat 6 OCR features will create a mess, in keeping with Adobe's policy.

 

[Larena]

The Acrobat 6 OCR is actually really good. It doesn't change the appearance of your document in any way. You still get to see the picture of the scanned document, but the picture becomes searchable.

In a completely un-Adobe manner, version 6 has a LOT of new features that are useful.

 

[WardXmodem]

Just a comment, before talking my employer into buying full acrobat standard for me, I purchased a very low end PDF producer, and what IT did was create a GRAPHIC for every page. This was useless to me, because I couldn't search for anything. That may have been what the creator of your PDFs did, (use a cheap PDF producer).

SO caution to anyone thinking of going on the cheap - you get what you pay for. It was perfectly usable for reading, and even printing, but not for searching, extracting, etc.

 

[jfhewitt]

Thinking along those lines, I did some tests. It is definitely the fact that the documents were scanned...rather than saved as PDF documents. As I think about it, a regular scan is really a picture, and without some sort of OCR would not be readable as a document. I think those planning to have lots of documents scanned should know about this problem, and get version 6 with the OCR capability.

 

[bpjman]

Linking to PDF content from External HTML

Is there a way to create a hyperlink in HTML that will open an acrobat document and go to a specific page or section automatically? I am not looking to embed links in an acrobat document, I need to link from various web pages into content within a pdf.

Thanks