Search vs. Find in PDFs

One of the things I learned at the Pacific Northwest Chapter 2008 Meeting of ASI is that there is a difference between search and find in Adobe Acrobat. In response to Maria’s comment I tried it out and here’s what I found.

Both search and find do the same basic task; locate what we’re looking for in the document. The main difference is that find is a simplified version of search.

Find
Type a word into the find box and Acrobat highlights each instance of it in the document.

Search
The search box offers many more options, like the advanced search features in databases and on Websites. Search can also be done in multiple documents at one time. In addition to highlighting the results in the document, Acrobat returns the number of instances found and a hyperlinked list of the results displayed with nearby text.

Here’s an excerpt of what Acrobat’s Help tool says about search.

When you use the Search window, object data and image XIF (extended image file format) metadata are also searched. For searches across multiple PDFs, Acrobat also looks at document properties and XMP metadata, and it searches indexed structure tags when searching a PDF index. If some of the PDFs you search have attached PDFs, you can include the attachments in the search.

Search appears to be a very powerful tool of which I’ve only scratched the surface. And, depending what version of the software is being used this feature may or may not be available.