JavaScript app enables search of PDF magazines while preserving integrity of company's carefully crafted user interface.As more companies and publishers play around with the flexibility and features of the latest Adobe Acrobat versions, PDFs are popping up everywhere. While this is a boon for PDF devotees, it has also caused some anxiety about how all those documents can be searched properly.
Adobe Systems Inc. has included some search features in Acrobat, but as several PDFzone readers have noted, that functionality falls short of the searching that they need to do.
In a recent article, PDFzone tackled the issue and pointed readers toward software like the OmniPage Search Indexer from ScanSoft Inc. and Acrobotics Inc.'s AutoCapture-X4.
These tools are useful, but sometimes the desire to build it yourself just proves too tempting.
That's the situation that Ben Marchbanks found himself in when figuring out how his customers and employees could search through the digital magazines produced by his Greenville, S.C.-based company printeraQtive.
Marchbanks had been eager to try the new search functionality in the latest iteration of Acrobat, but he was disappointed by the limits on its capabilities. "It's like Adobe took one step forward but two steps back," he said. "I'm sure they're satisfying the needs of some customers, but for us it just didn't work."
Click here to read how to help site visitors search PDFs without downloading them.
One problem was that printeraQtive had created a clean interface that had taken a great deal of time and effort to perfect. With the search function in Acrobat, a side panel opened up that not only disrupted the look of the company's materials but hurt navigation as well. There was no way to integrate the function into the content's look and feel, noted Marchbanks.
"We had to go back and rethink what we could do to preserve the interface," Marchbanks said. "We had a list of what we wanted, and figured out that rather than just shop around for plug-ins that do only part of what we need, we'd just build it ourselves."
Marchbanks and printeraQtive developers used a JavaScript engine to go through each document to create an index that would be internal to the PDF. That way, the text and images of each PDF could be searched and the results displayed in a selectable list.
Because the company designed the functionality, it was able to determine how the results would appear to a customer or employee and where a pop-up window with the results could be placed in relation to other design and text elements.
Also, because of the index creation, printeraQtive could use the content in other ways. Their publications now have a bar across the top of the design that can bring down a list of content, launch a search, mark favorite items within the PDF or input an order. Marchbanks said that because the company did the development, they were able to make the experience more seamless than they would have by simply using a plug-in.
"Everything we do is Acrobat-driven, so we try to stay within that framework," he said. "That's one of the reasons we didn't go after a third-party solution, because we didn't want to create any unnecessary hardship with some kind of incompatibility issue."
So far, the self-built tactic is working well, although it does have some limitations. Marchbanks admits that customers can't search across all documents at the same time, which is fast becoming a necessity at publishers with multiple PDFs. But customers can set their search to go through one PDF and then the next, saving download and single PDF search time.
Also, Marchbanks imagines that for companies that don't have a staffer with JavaScript experience, creating an internal index in a PDF might be much more difficult. And finally, it simply took yet more development time to create the application and tweak it until it was what the company wanted.
"It takes time and expertise, but it works, and that's what's important," he said. "I'm hopeful that Adobe will implement some more extensive search capability on the next round, though."
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