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Highlighting Multiple Words in a PDF Document

By Rick Borstein

Acrobat has powerful search capabilities, but one feature which is lacking is persistent highlighting via search. I discovered an interesting workaround to this problem after pondering this email message from a customer:

We have a fairly large case where I pulled up 7,000 pages of shift logs. I need to find select words throughout the document so I am using the word search to go through all the pages and pull out those pages that reference the word I am searching. I have some questions for you:

1) When the word search is done and I am looking at the document, all the words that I searched are highlighted in blue. However, when I print them off they are not highlighted anymore. Is there anyway to make it so those words are highlighted and will stay highlighted when I print them off and are easy to spot?

2) One of the words we are needing to search for our discovery produced over 3,000 pages. Obviously I really do not want to print off all of those pages. Is there anyway to print off a summary of where that word is on each page without printing off all 3,000 pages? 

I scratched my head for a bit, but I found a great workaround which takes advantage of Acrobat 8's Redaction feature. The end result is a persistently highlighted document like this:

Read on to learn about the workaround in easy step-by-step instructions.

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on December 04, 2007 (boomark / email).