Tutorials

Customize search preferences for your workflow

by Brie Gyncild and Andrew Faulkner

Get the results you want when you search by customizing the search preferences in Adobe® Acrobat® 7.0. If you’re working with Asian languages or searching text that contains accents or diacritical marks, your preference settings determine which documents you see. Additionally, you can make the Advanced Search window the default, specify the number of documents listed in the results, and define “proximity” for a search. If you search large sets of PDF files frequently, you’ll especially benefit from enabling Acrobat to cache information so that it can return results more quickly. Here, we provide a quick tour of the preference settings that change the way Acrobat searches your documents.

Open the Search Preferences pane

All of the Search preferences are contained in one pane in the Acrobat Preferences dialog box. To open the pane, choose Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Acrobat > Preferences (Mac OS), and then select Search from the list of categories.

When you’re satisfied with your selections, click OK. Selections you make in the Search Preferences pane are applied to any searches you perform until you change them again.

The Search Preferences pane contains all the search settings.

Specify search options

Select options in the Search section of the dialog box to determine which criteria Acrobat considers during a search, how many documents are returned, and how close words need to be to be considered relevant.

• Specify character attributes to include. If your PDF documents include Asian languages, and you want Acrobat to find half-width and full-width instances of the Asian language characters in the search text, select Ignore Asian Character Width (Figure 1). By default, Ignore Diacritics and Accents is selected. However, if you want Acrobat to distinguish between words that contain accents, such as café, and words that don’t, such as cafe, deselect this option (Figure 1).
• Display or hide the advanced search options. The Advanced Search window includes more complex searching options, such as the ability to match any of several words, take proximity of search words into account, and use stemming to find the root of the search word with different suffixes (such as -ing). You can access advanced search options by clicking Use Advanced Search Options at the bottom of the Search PDF window. However, to display the Advanced Search window by default, select Always Use Advanced Search Options in the Search Preferences dialog box (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Select options to determine search criteria.

• Specify how many documents to return. You can search across multiple documents, even an entire hard drive. By default, Acrobat lists the results from up to 100 PDF documents that contain the search words. To change the number, type a value in the Maximum Number of Documents Returned in Results field (Figure 2).
• Set parameters for proximity searches. If you select Proximity in the Advanced Search window, Acrobat notes how close together search words are in a document before it includes the document in the search results. By default, Acrobat considers the words relevant if they are within 900 words of each other in the document. If you want to search for documents in which the search terms are much closer together, change the value for Range of Words for Proximity Searches to 500, 100, or even 10 words.

Figure 2: Specify how many documents to return, and define “proximity” for advanced searches.

Use Fast Find

If you search the same set of PDF documents frequently, you can save time by enabling Acrobat to store information from those documents to refer to in future searches.

• Enable Fast Find. Select Enable Fast Find to generate a cache of information from an Adobe PDF file that you search, so that the information is available to Acrobat the next time you search the same file (Figure 3).
• Set the maximum cache size. The size of the cache determines how much information Acrobat stores about the documents you search. The default size is 20 MB. You may want to increase the cache if you frequently search a large set of PDF documents, but keep in mind that increasing the cache size may slow overall performance (Figure 3).
• Purge the cache contents as necessary. If Acrobat is performing sluggishly, or if the set of PDF files you search frequently changes, click Purge Cache Contents to empty the cache. If Enable Fast Find is still selected, Acrobat will create a new cache the next time you search (Figure 3).

Figure 3: For speedier searches, let Acrobat cache information from your documents.