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Search engines

Printed From: Foxit's Planet PDF Forum
Category: Lets Talk PDF
Forum Name: General
Forum Description: This is for experienced PDF users. Here you can talk about any topics not set aside for Developers, Prepress and PDF Forms.
URL: http://forums.planetpdf.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=61
Printed Date: 08 Dec 2019 at 3:59am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 11.10 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Search engines

Posted By: cowboy
Subject: Search engines
Date Posted: 12 Oct 2011 at 1:51pm

Hello,
I don't have/use Acrobat, but I have lots of pdf files that I have collected.
Many of them are books, History etc, that I would like to search.
Rather than searching individualy, I'm wondering if there is a Search tool (shareware or something)
that will search all of the files ?

I'm sure there is; so my questions are these;
1) what is a good one, (good = simple yet robust, easy to set up maintain....)
2) are there any that will do text and text as image
3) needs to work across many vintages of pdf files

I'm on Vista, and use Reader v10

Replies:

Posted By: aandi
Date Posted: 12 Oct 2011 at 2:16pm

I have a feeling that the Windows indexing facility should just work. It doesn't understand PDF files natively, but I _think_ that Reader installs a system extension to index PDF files.

Have you tried it?

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 12 Oct 2011 at 2:25pm

Are you talking about a search under the "start" menu ?
Assuming I've indexed certain folders, or is there a special search option.

Not sure if this would do the text/image files

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 17 Oct 2011 at 2:18pm

any other options/programs ??

Posted By: Rowan
Date Posted: 17 Oct 2011 at 2:23pm

I think they've discontinued Google Desktop Search but what about something like Copernic Desktop Search? That will let you search PDF files (amongst other files).

http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/ - http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 17 Oct 2011 at 9:14pm

Thanks
Sounds like an option, I wonder if it will search the PDF files that are image based ?

Posted By: Rowan
Date Posted: 18 Oct 2011 at 11:34am

I doubt that it will search for PDF files that are image based. To search an image based PDF this would require the PDF to be OCR'd first. I've had a quick look on their site and I don't see any mention of OCR support.

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 18 Oct 2011 at 1:56pm

Thanks

Anyone know of anything that will search with OCR ?

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 25 Oct 2011 at 3:28pm

Anything on OCR ?

Posted By: aandi
Date Posted: 25 Oct 2011 at 3:37pm

Acrobat will OCR, but not as part of searching. So will other products. They convert an image-only PDF to a text PDF, which can then be indexed.

There is nothing wrong in theory with something that does OCR while indexing (indeed, Google does), but I haven't seen anything in practice.

Posted By: cowboy
Date Posted: 27 Oct 2011 at 2:03pm

I guess the issue for me then is this, since I have many files like this it would be quite an effort to convert them all, and since I may only use them occasionally, hence the OCR search would be the preferred method....

p.s. It seems like a gaping hole, that while you are "in" i.e. viewing a PDF doc, that is image based you can't search it ????

Posted By: aandi
Date Posted: 27 Oct 2011 at 2:24pm

That is why OCR is there: to covert PDFs into searchable useful things. It is really expected of the PDF creator to take care of this, so the end user can just get on with life.