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Searching and Marking Multiple Words in a PDF

By Rick Borstein

Legal Professionals often need to search across a large number of documents. Finding a key fact, name or term is an important part of how you will apply your knowledge to a case.

For example, recently a paralegal sent me this email:

An attorney I work with just gave me a list of about 50 words and phrases as part of a case. I need to mark these terms each time I find them in my case documents. Help! Is there a way I can list all of the search words in a PDF?

While many folks have discovered the Search functionality in Acrobat, Acrobat 9 and below do not offer the ability to save searches or report the results.

Oddly, the only tool in Acrobat that allows you to search for terms and mark them in a PDF is part of the Search and Redact feature. This will add a mark to the page around the search term.

I wrote about using this technique in my previous article Highlighting Multiple Words in a PDF Document.

In Acrobat 9 Pro, it is possible to highlight multiple search terms using this same technique and you can do so "jiffy quick".

But, Acrobat redactions permanently remove information! That's true, once you apply them. However, in this use case, we are only going to mark the words using the redaction tool, not apply them which actually removes the information. So . . . no worries! I've also included a link to Joel Geraci's Redact to Highlight and Back, a free script for Acrobat that can convert redaction markups to standard Acrobat annotations.

In this article I'll show you how to:

1. Input a series of search terms and have Acrobat automatically mark them
2. Create a new PDF which summarizes all of the words where found

Read on to learn how to search and mark multiple words using Acrobat 9 Pro. . .

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on April 16, 2010 (boomark / email).