4
I want to highlight, preferably permanently, all instances of a search result in a PDF. For example, I want to highlight all examples of the word 'class' in a piece about Karl Marx to make finding the material I need to make notes on easier.
I suspect the reason I can't do this on either Foxit or Adobe Reader is that they both re-scan the document every time you highlight a search result, and this takes a long time.
Is it possible at all?
foxitt
Posted 2015-07-19T20:00:00.763
Reputation: 41
2
Open the PDF using Firefox browser and click the "highlight all" button after you open the Find dialog.
Greg H
Posted 2015-07-19T20:00:00.763
Reputation: 121
Unfortunately, the dialog shown in the linked image provided by Greg H is not the dialog that opens when searching a PDF document in Firefox, if the Adobe Reader plugin for Firefox is installed. The FF Adobe plugin does not offer "highlight all". In Chrome (for which I don't have the Adobe Reader plugin installed) the native PDF viewer does not offer the "highlight all" option. – Sean_999 – 2016-12-06T15:30:26.970
1
The workaround I discovered is to use the redaction tool. Change your redaction property from black to yellow, then use the "Text Overlay" function to re-enter that same word on the redaction mark
Barbara
Posted 2015-07-19T20:00:00.763
Reputation: 11
While this works (upvoted!) it's an ugly hack that causes Acrobat to consider the selected text as redacted and so this may be undesirable if the PDF is ever re-saved. – Dai – 2020-01-25T02:08:38.160
0
Free version of PDF-XChange Editor (Windows, Linux via Wine) highlights all entries for the keyword, and on top of that adds colored ticks on the scrollbar à la Chromium. Also, navigation (scrolling/jumping back and forth across pages) is as fast and the program remains as responsive as simpler yet more lightweight alternatives such as MuPDF or Sumatra PDF even when working with huge PDF files (hundreds of megabytes, thousands pages with illustrations).
All instances of a given word can be displayed by using Find… (Ctrl + F) tool for a quick preliminary lookup:
Using Search… (Ctrl + Shift + F) tool for additional gathering of a complete list for all encounters. Here, it only took one second to find 1139 entries in a 1300-page document, which I think is quite fast. Note, however, that this is "clean" document properly compiled from LaTeX source, and on a file that's been scanned and OCRed it could take longer:
Finally, by choosing Options… → Annotate search results → Highlight Search Results one can add permanent marks to the document and also save the changes to the PDF file:
Disclaimer: I am only a user, not a developer of PDF-XChange Editor and I'm not affiliated with Tracker software company.
andselisk
Posted 2015-07-19T20:00:00.763
Reputation: 327
It had to be verified whether it does actually work in Acrobat Reader DC (or XI), but it is possible to parse the document page by page, and search for the according keyword, and create the highlight annotation, and save the document. – Max Wyss – 2015-07-19T20:14:22.420