Most of us are familiar with PDF documents or “Portable Document Format”. Authors like saving their work as PDF’s because they can protect their copyright making the final work “read only”.
Adobe invented the format and their reader is available for free online so the pdf reader is universally available and many programs will ‘save as’ pdf, so the format has quickly become ubiquitous. But many users, i.e. readers of e-books are not aware that there are other functions besides reading and printing. They think that because the document has security features they cannot carry out searches, for example. I will talk about security features in another article, but let’s start here with Search and Find.
Search and Find.
If you are looking for a keyword in the pdf document you have open, it is a simple thing to hit CTRL+ F together and a window pops up in the menu bar. Mine is coloured green. (I am using Adobe reader 9.4).
Just type in the word or phrase and hit enter.
You can also use the arrows which appear next to the search box. You can search for ‘next’ or ‘previous’ instance of the word.
The drop down menu attached to the search box( ↓) also has more options to tick. I leave it up to you to explore this feature.
You can also get the FIND function from the drop down menu under EDIT in the top bar of Adobe reader if you forget CTRL +F. The find function is useful to find characters or words in the document.
You can find phrases, but be careful as it is an exact search. If I am looking for “How to manage risk” it will return no results if the actual phrase in the document is ” How to manage your risk”. See the difference?
The logic is not as ‘fuzzy’ as say a search in Google.
Capitalisation is important too, so don’t tick the Case Sensitive option in the search box menu, unless you specifically want to use that feature.
Now a full search function also exists. Shift+Ctrl+F or if you can’t manage that combination go to EDIT and click SEARCH.
A Search extends the function to include the whole document, all pdfs on the desktop, in a specific folder, a drive or the entire computer.
The results appear in a table and you can click on each and go straight to the item – it is very fast, which is a huge time saver when you know you have read something but can’t remember where.
For example I have a number of pdfs on forex trading. I go to Search. Click on “All PDF documents in” and a drop down box opens. I choose to browse for the most likely looking folder – in this case my forex folder and type in my phrase ‘money management’ In seconds my faithful PC returns 12 documents with 45 instances.
I expand one of the listed items and it shows the phrase in its context.
e.g important money management strategies
good money management skills, patience, and so forth.
Clicking on one of these quickly opens the pdf and takes me straight there. Brilliant!
Of course for some, the drawback is that hand written text cannot be searched for in Adobe reader. PDFfiles can contain images of course, including hand writing.
If you need to search handwritten text then it will be necessary to convert the PDF to another format such as DOC. You could also save the file as text and then the plain text can be searched once you open the txt file in word or notepad.
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