PDFs: Searching the Unsearchable

Contributed by Jay Schroyer

Released in the early 90s, the Adobe® Portable Document Format, or PDF, wasn’t quickly embraced by the technological world as it is now. In its earliest form, it just didn’t integrate well enough with web technology to make it useful. With subsequent versions and upgrades to Acrobat (the program that creates PDFs), the PDF is now one of the most commonly used and accepted forms of electronic communication in the computer world.

By essentially “printing” a document electronically, Acrobat is able to reduce the size of a document in virtually any software on both Mac® and PC platforms, embed fonts and photos and multimedia objects and web links and leave behind a small, fast-loading file that can be opened by anyone who takes a moment to download the free Adobe Acrobat® Reader®.

Web content providers often use PDFs to post resource information online for numerous advantageous reasons. First of all, no matter what Microsoft® office product created the original file, a PDF can simply be made from its contents instead of having to retype or transfer all of the original information from the native file into a web page.

Once the full version of Acrobat is installed, it’s easy to learn how to go to the “Print” option in say Word or PowerPoint® and choose Adobe PDF as your printer. In seconds, a PDF is created from your original file. By controlling the resolution output of the finished product, the PDF file is generally smaller than the original file, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space when uploading it to a server which leaves more room for great content.

PDFs relatively small size also allows the file to load faster when users access it, especially helpful for those still stuck with a dial-up connection. Another important feature is that PDFs are unalterable. If you open up a Word file that someone sends you, you can very easily edit the document as you see fit and then save your changes. With a PDF, since the information has been electronically “printed” into one large image, the end user cannot make any changes to it. This process also can prevent wholesale copying and pasting of your information if you wish to keep it proprietary. So whether you’re posting articles or instructions, a PDF is a great way to post online content quickly and safely.

The only potential downside to posting your web information in PDF format is that it is often overlooked by the all-embracing, web-crawling “spider” programs that search websites for keywords. This searching allows your favorite search programs to stay up to date and accurate whenever you type in a search term.

Through the PDF process, your original text is in essence turned into an image. So, if your site uses the phrase “free MS office lesson” in the hopes that users searching for free computer software training will find your site through a search engine, your PDF posted article might not be recognized because instead of the web spider finding your keywords, it finds an image.

There are ways to get around this dilemma. In the full version of Acrobat (which you need to create a PDF anyway), you can actually select certain words, phrases, or images and assign them a web address that will make them hot links within the document. Although laborious, these should show up during a spider’s search and if you alter all of your relevant keywords in this manner, it should make your PDFs searchable by these programs.

If you’re trying to build your own database of information (not for the web) and want to search a lot of PDFs that you may have accumulated, you’ll find it difficult to do without some sort of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

You may have heard of this type of service before where a company takes stacks of hard copy documents and feeds them into a scanner. The OCR software works hand in hand with the scanner to recognize certain shapes of letters and convert them into word processing documents. In this manner, you can take mountains of paper records and convert them to electronic files that you can edit at will.

Once your PDFs have been scanned with OCR software, the information can then be saved into a Word or Excel file and will become searchable on your own computer for your database.

If you’re interested in creating your own PDFs, you can look into purchasing the full version of Adobe Acrobat (which is already up to version 8 now) for around $450. If you’re upgrading from a previous version, it’s slightly less at $160, but if all you want to do is access PDFs and read them, you can download the Acrobat Reader free of charge from Adobe’s website.

Small, safe, and easy to share, PDFs are a great advancement in electronic communication. As long as spider software evolves alongside, the PDF will continue to make web searches speedy and fruitful.

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