Useful Commands Adobe Acrobat (Reader)

Toolbar - Text Select

This command selects text on-screen. You can then execute ôcopy and pasteö operations to transfer text bits to other applications.

Alternative: use the command Save As under the File menu of the Adobe Acrobat software to save the text from ôtext-imageö PDF files to an RTF (ôRich Text Fileö) file.

Toolbar / Tools menu - TouchUp Text

File menu - Save As - RTF

This command allows to save the text from ôtext-imageö PDF files to an RTF file.

Tip: select the command Preferences - Table/Formatted Text under the Edit menu of the Adobe Acrobat software and select the tab RTF Export to determine a few export options.

Alternative: select text on-screen with the Text Select tool on the toolbar of the Adobe Acrobat software and execute ôcopy and pasteö operations.

Toolbar / Edit menu - Find

The Find command finds complete words or word parts in the current PDF document. Acrobat looks for the word by sequentially reading every word on every page in the file.

Toolbar / Edit menu - Search

The Search command allows you to perform advanced and fast searching on a collection of indexed PDF documents:

Warning: not all versions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader software include the search function!

Warning: index-based searching implies that the ôfull-textö index was created for a collection of PDF files (with the command Catalog of the Adobe Acrobat software). A ôfull-textö index is an alphabetized list of every word used in a document or a series of documents.

Advantage: index-based searching is much faster than the Find command. Acrobat goes right to the word in the list rather than progressively reading through the documents.

How it works: refer to the documentation that came with your Adobe Acrobat (Reader) software to learn how searching works.

Edit menu - Preferences - Table/Formatted Text - RTF Export