Searching PDFs

You have lots of control and lots of possibilities for running effective and efficient searches in Adobe Acrobat. A search can be broad or narrow, including many different kinds of data and covering multiple Adobe PDFs.

If you work with large numbers of related PDFs, you can define them as a catalog in Acrobat Pro, which generates a PDF index for the PDFs. Searching the PDF index—instead of the PDFs themselves—dramatically speeds up searches. See Creating PDF indexes.

You run searches to find specific items in PDFs. You can run a simple search, looking for a search term within in a single file, or you can run a more complex search, looking for various kinds of data in one or more PDFs. You can selectively replace text.

You can run a search using either the Search window or the Find toolbar. In either case, Acrobat searches the PDF body text, layers, form fields, and digital signatures. You can also include bookmarks and comments in the search. Only the Find toolbar includes a Replace With option.

When you type the first few letters to search in a PDF, Acrobat provides suggestions for the matching word and its frequency of occurrence in the document. When you select the word, Acrobat highlights all the matching results in the PDF.

The Search window offers more options and more kinds of searches than the Find toolbar. When you use the Search window, object data and image XIF (extended image file format) metadata are also searched. For searches across multiple PDFs, Acrobat also looks at document properties and XMP metadata, and it searches indexed structure tags when searching a PDF index. If some of the PDFs you search have attached PDFs, you can include the attachments in the search.

Where you start your search depends on the type of search you want to run. Use the Find toolbar for a quick search of the current PDF and to replace text. Use the Search window to look for words or document properties across multiple PDFs, use advanced search options, and search PDF indexes.

The Find toolbar searches the currently open PDF. You can selectively replace the search term with alternative text. You replace text one instance at a time. You cannot make a global change throughout a PDF or across multiple PDFs.

The Search window enables you to look for search terms in multiple PDFs. For example, you can search across all PDFs in a specific location or all files in an open PDF Portfolio. The Replace With option is not availble in the Search window.

After you run a search from the Search window, the results appear in page order, nested under the names of each searched document. Each item listed includes a few words of context (if applicable) and an icon that indicates the type of occurrence.

The icon next to an instance of the search results indicates the search area in which the instance appears. Selecting an icon has the following effect:

You can save the search results as a PDF or CSV file. For a video, see Saving Search Results in Acrobat.

By default, the Search window displays basic search options. Click Show More Options near the bottom of the window to display additional options. To restore the basic options, click Show Less Options near the bottom of the window.

Commonly used Boolean operators include the following:

AND

Use between two words to find documents that contain both terms, in any order. For example, type paris AND france to identify documents that contain both paris and france. Searches with AND and no other Boolean operators produce the same results as selecting the All Of The Words option.

NOT

Use before a search term to exclude any documents that contain that term. For example, type NOT kentucky to find all documents that don’t contain the word kentucky. Or, type paris NOT kentucky to find all documents that contain the word paris but not the word kentucky.

OR

Use to search for all instances of either term. For example, type email OR e-mail to find all documents with occurrences of either spelling. Searches with OR and no other Boolean operators produce the same results as selecting the Any Of The Words option.

^ (exclusive OR)

Use to search for all instances that have either term but not both. For example, type cat ^ dog to find all documents with occurrences of either cat or dog but not both cat and dog.

( )

Use parentheses to specify the order of evaluation of terms. For example, type white AND (whale OR ahab) to find all documents that contain either white and whale or white and ahab. (The query processor performs an OR query on whale and ahab and then performs an AND query on those results with white.)

To learn more about Boolean queries, syntax, and other Boolean operators that you can use in your searches, refer to any standard text, website, or other resource with complete Boolean information.

A full-text index is created when someone uses Acrobat to define a catalog of PDFs. You can search that index rather than running a full-text search of each individual PDF in the catalog. An index search produces a results list with links to the occurrences of the indexed documents.

In Mac OS, indexes created with some older versions of Acrobat are not compatible with the Acrobat X Search feature. If you have upgraded recently, update the index before using Acrobat X to search.

In the Preferences dialog box under Categories, select Search.