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Re: PDF



Michele's point is correct, at least as of now - you cannot search multiple
PDF files in a web environment.  In order to search across PDF, you need to
index the files you want to search across (it's a feature included in the
basic Acrobat package, best price I've seen was $228 for V. 5.0 at cdw.com).
The problem is the index files are not readable in a web environment, so you
would have to search each file individually, which to me removes some of the
benefit of the package.

I used it extensively at my last job, scanning Press Releases and Executive
Memos, and the index saved me more times than I care to remember - it meant
instant returns for a query, rather than hours searching through memos.  You
need to run the indexing program periodically if you're adding files to keep
the index current, so I would do it once a year when I added the previous
year's memos & releases.  You can also put the files on a CD, if it's
something you think would be useful for others in the organization to have,
or if you wanted to use it as a PR tool (just include the indexes too so
they can search across the docs.)

If you plan on converting Word documents to PDF, it's very easy & clean to
convert them to PDF - Acrobat installs PDF writer into Office programs so
you can print directly to PDF, which usually avoids the complications of
scanning with it's idiosyncracies and missed words.  However - if you plan
on scanning many documents in to create PDFs, you'll need to buy the Acrobat
Capture program as well, which runs about $600.  You can scan pages into the
$200 program, but it's not designed for large-scale scanning.  Capture comes
with a 20,000 page limit, which will cover most of us, and will let you
batch scan & process larger groups of documents.  The scanning can be rough
- fonts get changed and words aren't recognized, even in typed documents, so
you may have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up.

One last note - there's a really neat feature in Acrobat that allows you to
capture web pages, even entire web sites.  You can then index the site and
search through it.  I was going to use it to capture the in-house newspaper
off the web, which would save me the trouble of indexing the paper by hand,
article by article.  The powers that be nixed the idea, unfortunately, but
it was a very cool feature if you want to archive your website and be able
to search it or search different versions of it.

DS

______________________________________
Daniel Sokolow, Archives Coordinator
David Taylor Archives
North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System
155 Community Drive
Great Neck, NY 11021
mailto:dsokolow@nshs.edu

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michele Wellck [SMTP:mwellck@CALACADEMY.ORG]
> Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 5:56 PM
> To:   ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
> Subject:      Re: PDF
>
> It's always interesting to see what topics will drag someone out of
> habitual lurkerdom...
>
> I've also been considering putting some of our Annual Reports up as PDF
> files for ease of access, but haven't done anything about it yet partly
> because I'm not sure the searching/indexing really meets our needs.  In
> other words, as I no doubt imperfectly understand it, one can search the
> text within a given PDF file, but the text within each file isn't
> indexed for the overall site.  So if I wanted to know if any of our
> annual reports mentioned research relating to the Galapagos Islands, for
> example, I'd have to open up each document and search separately?  Can
> anyone more informed than I say whether there's a way to have a
> meta-index of PDF documents so that a Web search or our internal web
> site search would turn up text within the annual reports?
>
> Thanks, as always, for the excellent counsel of the list!
>
> Michele
>
>

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