I’m reading a PDF file that has the word polemical in it about thirty times. I tried searching for it and it came back with 0 results. I tried searching for the word The which it probably has about two hundred times, same thing. Worried that the reason for my lack of success was that there were too many occurrences of the words I was searching for, I searched for the word Joys which (to the best of my knowledge) appears only once. No matches.
Does the search function on PDF’s actually do anything? If so, how can I work it?
The two great advantages of PDFs are:[ul][li]You can search for text, and All graphics in the original source doc are retained[/ul]However, this is only true if the document creator knew what they were doing. If they started with a scanned image then made a PDF out of it, you still have only an image, and not text; searching will not work unless OCR was performed as an intermediate step.[/li]
Here’s a site where all PDFs were created properly and are searchable. AtomZ even indexes this site with their search engine. Load any one of these docs and see if you can do a search for text in it.
http://doorbell.net/pz
Or, post the URL to the one you are having trouble with, and I’ll take a look at it.
There is a binoculars icon in the toolbar of .pdf files that triggers the Search function, much as it does in Microsoft Office documents. If it is enabled you can search that document; if it is grayed out, you cannot.