Agency uses Verity's SDK to enable employees and vendors to search PDF catalogs on an intranet without downloading.In previous articles, PDFzone has gone sleuthing for products on behalf of readers who wrote to us to complain that there wasn't enough search capability built into Adobe Acrobat for their tastes. But some readers prefer to do their own detective work, and then tip us off when they've discovered what seems to be an overlooked gem.
That was the case with James Dan Norman, a project manager for the Tennessee Valley Authority, who developed a fondness for Verity Inc. products.
The TVA had created a large digital catalog of materials that could be used at various sites in the organization. Like a jumbo office supplies catalog, the publication had descriptions, part numbers, and other information for just about every material that anyone at the TVA could possibly use.
Norman knew that it would be especially useful to take the catalog and put it on the TVA's intranet, so that suppliers and employees could find what they needed from anywhere. In order to keep the project workable, he broke the catalog into a number of PDFs, essentially creating a digital library of mini-catalogs with products arranged alphabetically.
One feature of Adobe Acrobat that Norman liked was its indexing and hit-to-hit search capability, but he was disappointed that those could only be done on a local drive, not on an intranet.
Publisher builds custom application for searching online PDFs. Click here to read more.
"It was frustrating, because I'd gotten used to these features and they just didn't translate to what I wanted to do with the catalog," he said. "It came down to a decision of either asking users to download all those PDFs, which would have been counterproductive, or finding something that could handle the searches."
He wanted the same look and feel as he had on his desktop when users searched the catalogs online, so he went looking for a product that could deliver the functionality without users having to download every PDF file from the intranet.
Problem Solved
What Norman found was Verity's KeyView, which searches multiple PDFs on a Web site, and as he noted, "also supports byte serving so the results are 'spoon fed' hit by hit to the user."
KeyView is a software developer kit that supports almost 300 file formats in over 90 languages. The kit is designed for exporting, viewing and filtering data and was originally designed to be integrated with enterprise applications through programming languages like Java.
Two other Verity products also have some PDF search capability, according to the company's manager of business development, Brian Di Silvestro. Verity LiquidOffice is a business process management application that can do in-process content and data search, and Verity TeleForm is a document capture program that allows users to make searchable PDFs.
The company felt that adding this capability would help users and developers like Norman, who want more flexibility in how they search PDFs.
"People are tired of downloading PDFs just to be able to look for one or two key items, it takes too much time and trouble, especially if the files are large," said Di Silvestro. "If you have a 500-page manual, and what you want is on page 357, you don't want that whole thing sitting on your hard drive."
Users searching the TVA catalog can browse online through all 12 volumes of the catalog with full text search capability.
"Not only are they able to search, but the program gives the actual volume the text string is in, and opens the PDF to take them to the first hit," said Norman. "So you can navigate from hit to hit just like with a normal PDF search tool, but do it online."
He also praised the tool's speed, noting that because the PDFs are preindexed, it makes fast work of searches.
"Hopefully, Adobe will include some of this functionality into its next version, because I feel like more and more people are going to want this kind of capability," Norman added.
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