Why won't Adobe Reader search on a document?

September 27, 2006 7:03 PM

"Search" function in Adobe Reader seems to be a bit lazy.

(This is Adobe Reader 7.0, in case that's relevant)

For some documents I can search for a word no problem. However, I'm going through a large volume of papers from the JSTOR database, and was starting to download the ones that looked related to what I needed (in PDF "high quality" format). But when I went into the docs and searched for keywords, nothing would come up. Even words that were clearly in the document. The resolution seems to be excellent though. Is there something else I can try? Or is it just the way the database formatted the PDF?

posted by Idiot Mittens to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Most -- or perphaps even all -- JSTOR PDFs are page images only, and have no text included. You can run the PDF through OCR software of your choosing, though, and then search your full archive.
posted by piro at 7:07 PM on September 27, 2006

I see, thank you. Is there a commonly used (and free) OCR software program that's better than others?
posted by Idiot Mittens at 7:15 PM on September 27, 2006

I believe that PDFs can use some kind of irritating DRM to make them unable to be copy-pasted or to be searched. Try selecting some text and copying it into notepad or textpad and see if you don't get garbage!

I don't know of a solution to this.
posted by aubilenon at 7:45 PM on September 27, 2006

I have run into this issue with CRS (Congressional Research Documents) provided by an online service. To cut down on file size, they don't include the text itself with the document in Adobe. The text and the image of the page are separable as piro stated. So sometimes you only get the image if the owner so chooses.
posted by bim at 7:50 PM on September 27, 2006

Also, if you get your hands on a fully functioning copy of Adobe Acrobat it has the ability to turn picture PDF's into fully functioning ones.

Ask around see if you can email it to a lawyer friend of yours or something (they create PDF's all the time).
posted by jourman2 at 7:52 PM on September 27, 2006

Cool, I'll look into Acrobat. I think they have it at the library if I can't get it. Thanks everyone!
posted by Idiot Mittens at 8:19 PM on September 27, 2006

Google has just released a free OCR reading software - Tesseracht (sp?). Haven't personally tried it out yet...
posted by stratastar at 10:46 PM on September 27, 2006