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You can use either the Find toolbar or the Search PDF window to locate a word, series of words, or partial word in the active Adobe PDF document. The Find toolbar provides a basic set of scan options for searching for text in only the current PDF document; the Search PDF window searches more PDF areas than the Find toolbar, provides more advanced options, and lets you search for text in one or more PDF documents, an index of scan to PDF files, or PDF files on the Internet (see Searching Adobe PDF  a PDF index. In addition, the Search PDF window lets you include attachments in the search.Note: Adobe PDF documents can have multiple layers. If the search results include an occurrence on a hidden scan  layer, selecting that occurrence displays an alert that asks if you want to make that layer visible.


When you get a document that has been scanned rather than exported from the software that created it, such as MS Word, it's just an image (i.e. a picture). Remember, to a computer, a picture of the letter "A" is not the same as the text character "A," so when you try to text-search an image, you get no hits because also many software and hardware packages that scan paper directly into scan searchable PDF. For now, I'm not going to address using Acrobat or other tools as the scanning software. For our purposes today, let's just say, "you've got those image files that you want to convert into something you can search."

The unique thing about PDF scanning software is that you can have an exact image of the document, plus the text, plus all kinds of metadata ALL IN ONE FILE. This is a wonderful thing -- but I will expound on its wonderfulness later... With the "Paper Capture" tools in Acrobat, the software reads the picture, and figures out what the text is. So while you still see the "image," the software can also read the underlying text. OCR PDF.

Softi Software