Tagging in Acrobat Pro 8

September 12, 2009 3:59 PM

I would like to be able to search comments in numerous pdf files at once using Adobe Acrobat Pro 8. Can it be done?

Ideally, I would be able to designate a folder to search within. This way, the comments could act as tags. E.g. if I have a folder that is full of articles about Haydn that I've read and marked up, I could easily locate every comment in which I've written "Symphony No. 8." Then I could click on the search result and the appropriate pdf would open magically at the right place.

If this isn't possible in Acrobat Pro 8, any suggestions on how I might do it? I'm willing to entertain the possibility of using other software, though I really like Acrobat Pro aside from this.

posted by nosila to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Their are a couple of ways to do this. If you open up a pdf in Acrobat and then choose "Full Acrobat Search" you can designate a folder to search into. However, the best way to do this is to use Acrobat's index feature. Index files basically act as a table of contents (they have the extension .pdx).

Go into Acrobats Help feature and search for index. It'll walk you through the process of making an index.
posted by jeremias at 4:59 PM on September 12

That is going to be extremely helpful to me, so thanks!

Unless I'm mistaken, and I hope I am, this still won't allow me to search ONLY my own comments and markups.
posted by nosila at 5:27 PM on September 12

I've taken a page from the Twitter playbook to solve this problem (for future searchers):

In my markups, I preface any word that I would like to behave as a tag with a slash, e.g. /dialectic or /trio. That, combined with indexing and Acrobat Pro's "search within X folder" and "search comments" functions do exactly what I want.

I will never have to remember anything again! (Danger...)
posted by nosila at 6:25 PM on September 13

Hells yeah I marked myself best answer.
posted by nosila at 6:26 PM on September 13 [1 favorite has favorites]