[blindlaw] Adobe Acrobat Search Function

[Ross Doerr]

A short time ago there was a thread on this list about searching documents in Adobe Acrobat reader, and the individual posting it was frustrated about trying to use the Adobe Acrobat find funtion.
I am right there with that person, Adobe has such a poor find function for those of us (like me) who use screen readers, that it is pretty much useless.
Someone suggested using the Word List (control-Insert-W) to search, and that proved to work pretty darn good. The drawback to that one was that you can't put in the word you want to search for, you use what is available in the listing that JAWS created.
Not bad, but darn it, we'd still like to be better able to search PDF documents, right?
 Here is what I found works all right (note I said all right, not great), and it seems to work better in documents that were created as proper PDF documents.
First you need to open up Adobe and change an Adobe setting to read the entire document instead of one page at a time, and you do it like this:
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1. Press CTRL+K to open the Adobe Reader preferences.

2. Press R to move to the Reading category.

3. Press ALT+P to move to the item Page vs. Document. Set it to Read the Entire Document

4. Move to the OK button and activate it.

>From now on it will take a little longer to load large documents, but JAWS can see the entire document now. Use the JAWS find, INSERT+CTRL+F.

Note: Once you have done the first hit, tap the F3 key to repeat the command to jump from hit to hit.

I've tried this in one or two fairly long documents, 20 to 30 -pages, and it does seem to work.

But having said this, I'd caution you to remember what your original Adobe Settings were before you made this change so that you can restore them. It always pays to know how to restore if you don't like the way the new setting works.

I hope some of you find this useful.

Ross A. Doerr Esq.