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Community Blogs: Leonard Rosenthol: Checking a PDF for Searchable Text


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Posted: 2008-10-01

Checking a PDF for Searchable Text

A friend of mine from various PDF conferences wrote me to ask me the following question:

Download Music KDD Kds Ft Robbie Craig Keak Da Sneak

Enclosed is a file that looks great, but the text can't be searched (or copied).  Is there a tool that can automatically detect that all/most of  the text in a PDF file can be searched (or not)?

I wrote - OF COURSE - Acrobat 9's Preflight!

With one of the many new checks that we've added to Acrobat 9 Preflight, you can easily detect whether any text in a PDF can not be properly encoded as Unicode (aka can be extracted/searched properly).

I've built just such a profile and have uploaded it here!   Just download the file, then double-click it to install it into Preflight and it will appear in your "Quick Checks" section.

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