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Word and Phrase search in PDF Files
There are a number of programs available for word searching in PDF files, some large and expensive commercial solutions, and some freeware. I have tried just about all of them, as I have a large collection of PDF files which I often want to search through.
Two that will do the job are "Copernic Desktop Search", and "Search Inform" (Using Search Inform, only if the appropriate Adobe filter, which is free, is also installed).
Unfortunately, both of these programs rely on indexing files before they are usable, tie up resources, and slow down the machine. They also install a lot of stuff I don't want. Search inform does a much better job than Copernic, as the PDF results from Copernic are barely readable. But both programs are cumbersome to set up and operate.
I spent a long time looking for a reasonable solution to this problem, and then stumbled on it by chance! It may well be that if you do much with PDF files you already have the solution as well, without even knowing it.
The very best PDF viewer available in my opinion is PDFXChange. If you don't already have it, you can get it here.
http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer/
This program has a number of absolutely first class and powerful features which are not at all usual in freeware versions, but I am only going to concentrate on one of these here, and that is the search function.
As far as I am able to determine, the functions I am about to describe are not documented anywhere.
So, what are these marvelous functions, where are they, and how do they work? They are not really hidden, just very unobtrusive.
To access them go to the menu bar of PDFXChange and hover on the "search" icon button;
This gives you a fly-out menu with "Show/Hide Full Search Pane" Click on the icon and the full search pane will be opened in the display. Nothing particularly impressive about that you might think, but wait...............there's more!
In the search pane you have various options. The one that interests us here is "Where would you like to search?"
If you click on the "Down arrow" at the end of the box, you get a complete navigation tree.
So, navigate to whatever directory contains the PDF files you want to search, or browse for it, and click on it to select it.
Now, any word or phrase you type into the search box will be searched for in every PDF file in that directory. The results will be shown in the search pane. I set up a test directory with a few files for this article, as searching my main PDF directories may take some time, I have several thousand PDF documents in most of them.
So, the results of a search for "Testing" are shown in the search pane with the title of the document as a header,and the highlighted phrase ( or word) shown as part of the text in which it occurs and a small green icon to the left of the text. If you hover on the icon with the mouse cursor it will show the page number of the document where it found the phrase.
Hmm...still nothing magical about that either...........
But.......and here comes the really magical bit! If you click on any single result, it will be highlighted, PDFXChange opens a tab containing that document in the main view window, jumps to the page containing it, and highlights it there as well. Now that's magic!!! :)
This function has solved all my problems with PDF searching.
I have to admit here, I had this software for a long time before I discovered it could do this. I felt really stupid when I discovered it, most especially in view of the hours I spent on the net looking for solutions, and then testing them all.
Related Topics
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-pdf-tools.htm
Tags: PDF, PDF Text search, PDF Phrase search, Searching PDF files.Free PDF Search
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Comments
Thanks! I'm wondering if you know if there's a way to do this...
Search a file of documents for the name of a person that exists after "Dear", then save each of those documents with that name added to the file name. So each file would have it's own recipients name in the document name. Is that even possible via a macro or something?? You seem like someone who might know and I'm having a heck of a time find out.
Thanks!
This category currently has no editor. You will get a greater response to your query by posting it in our forum.
awesome. thanks. works well so far. will update if any problems.
It sounds perfect for my needs!!! Is it possible to tell me if it works ok with greek fonts? I have a lot of greek scanned books and I am looking for something like this you describe for searching in them!!!
Try free PDF-XChange Viewer with OCR. Greek is included in the list of supported languages.
Thanks for the great tip. Does anyone know if any of the reference managers such as Zotero or Mendeley allow free text searching like this? Both allow storage of documents in the cloud. In addition to searching, I would like to record summaries and comments of the articles that I associate with the articles and would hopefully be able to search, as well as perhaps reorganizing my comments so that I can organize citations. What reference managers do you use in combination with PDFXChange?
Yes, it is a very useful programme but what happens if the pdf is not a real pdf file? Then the programme has a zero result and says no match, and the documents might have the word in more than once. This is the problem I can not solve for the time being:(Any suggestions?
The latest version of PDF-Xchange viewer has an unbelievably good OCR function included with it - for Free!! You can OCR a scanned PDF file and as long as the text on the scan is reasonably readable it will make the file fully searchable. PDF-Xchange is an incredible piece of Freeware.
Wow! Installed free version of PDF-XChange Viewer and it added the iFilter into the Windows Explorer indexing service. What a relief. What a great program. They deserve mega kudos.
Thanks for suggesting it.
Scott
Works great - very fast search. Thanks for writing about it!!
It solved my purpose. After spending almost half a day and looking for solution, this find was awesome.
Thanks for it !!
Adobe reader 9 does the same...
Next to the search window there's an pull-down option to open the full search function of the reader and that does the same (little slower but still OK).
Thank you Thank you, what a great tool that I didn't know existed. Have been using PDF X-change for years and didn't know about this.
The option “Search” in PDF-XChange Viewer is more versatile. I can find the words or word's part even in Bookmarks or Comments (the same work I can't do in Foxit)
Similar search options as in PDF-X can be found in FoxitReader, and it is freeware too. But thank you for this information and good explanation.
Thanks for pointing this out, and to the above commenter for saying that Foxit Reader has this function too. Who knew?
I've been using Foxit Reader for years, and for years also wished I had a way to search inside all my PDFs, since Google Desktop didn't seem to be doing the trick for me.
I have many many ebooks in PDF format, and had been wanting for years to reread a particular story, but couldn't remember which it was. I'd never figured the title and author out by searching the internet. Finally, with my first search using Foxit Reader pointed at the folder containing my ebooks, I searched for one word I knew should be in the story, and browsed through my results. Within five minutes I had settled into rereading the novel.
Now I really must pause reading and go to sleep, but I wanted to say thanks first!
Brilliant! Works well. Thank you very much indeed!
bro,its really good thing,but it just finds out the english word,
and i also need for arabic words,have you any experience.
This is an absolutely first class desktop search machine for PDF's and other files;
http://code.google.com/p/dngrep/
Regards....Mike Connor
I have been using PDF-Xchange since it is ideal for use on a tablet and I LOVE it. I thought I had to get an extra piece of software do do multi-file searches but I am glad to find out my current package has it...
Hi I am also using Windows 7 Professional 32bit and have lots of my PDF files in D-drive, which upon search did not show the desired result. As suggested I tried the free Foxit PDF Ifilter and installed the desktop version. After installing the Foxit Ifilter, I followed the same step suggested by CO997. Nontheless, I did not get success. Can anyone help me out.
....cant get the searchinform to work under Win7, I have the same docs indexed with searchinform under XP , and works like a dream....whats happening ?? (always stops indexing before completion).
Dont see the point here ....
Both firefox, and adobe has the same search features.
pdfxchange dont have any advanced search features , or indexing. If you got really many docs u need indexing, pdfxchange does it a little better.
Don't know why this is not mentioned but word searches inside pdfs work in Windows 7 explorer windows (32 bit and 64 bit) and is free. You have to configure "index options" from the control panel and download the free adobe filter for 64bit windows 7 platforms but it works well on my windows 7 system. This uses system resources to create an indexed file but the results show up instantly. The memory usage of the process "SearchIndexer" on my windows system is only 58,624k. Windows 7 has a search box inside every windows explorer window so you can just search the current directory or the use the new library feature to search documents, emails, etc all at once.
The search results show the document title, first two lines containing the text, the full path and partition of the filename, the size, and date modified. If you click on the search item, it gives a preview pane similar to the one mentioned in the article above. Comparing the native searching in windows 7 to Google Desktop from my opinion also is that Windows 7 is better. The google desktop search puts results on multiple web pages and the user has to keep clicking pages to see the google results, whereas, in the windows explorer window, all results are just appear on one page so you can scroll down. The preview method on google desktop is kludgy from my perspective also.
I personally loathe Microsoft and have to use it because of compatibility and cost issues. I think your users should try the native search first since it is free in Windows 7. It is much faster than Windows XP and Vista (which was never usable in the first place).
I tried some of the ones and others mentioned in the article. For me they all did not work well for the simple reason that I have thousands of pdf documents scattered in many folders and partitions and each search was taking an average of 30 minutes using them because they do not index the results and I have a couple of 2-Terabyte disks to get thru manually.
I am using Windows 7 Professional 32bit and also have thousands of pfd files that I need to search. I have successfully set my system up to index my files and make the contents available for search using the Windows 7 search bar. I downloaded the free Foxit PDF Ifilter from their website and installed it (go to the download page and look for the free desktop version). After installing the Foxit Ifilter, in Windows I opened Indexing Options and clicked on the Advanced button then clicked on the File Types tab. On this page I selected the Index Properties and File Contents option. After clicking OK, the indexer immediately starts building the index. After it was finished, I realized that my C-drive was not included in the index criteria so I added it. Again the indexer immediately started rebuilding the index which ran for a couple of hours. For a test, I opened Explorer and in the search box in the upper right hand corner, I entered a word that I knew was in one of my pdf files. I quickly got hundreds of results. I realized that the results were coming from everything on my C-Drive, so I navigated to my PDF folder and searched again. My files popped up in less than a second. Success!
brilliant solution!
best way to crawl my 500+ PDF articles to find keywords
klisanor
iam younes a student in the university in algeria this great i hope you continue in this success with god welling.
Adobe Reader can do the exact same thing, I just found out Googling my intention of searching multiple PDF files and then trying it in Adobe Reader.
Yes Adobe Reader allows it (Edit/Advanced search)
Fantastic!!! I'm an academic and I hate the bulky programs like copernic! This is awesome! :-)
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