Tag Archives: Easy PDF Search

Easy PDF Search – the search options explained

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When searching for words and phrases in Easy PDF Search (EPS), you have 4 options:

For the first option, the process flow is as follows:

  • EPS looks for all the folders set up in the selected libraries
  • in each folder, EPS compiles a list of all the files matching the search pattern
  • for each new file, EPS will index that file
  • for each modified file, EPS will rebuild the index
  • EPS then searches for the entered words/phrases in the list of files it compiled in step 2 above

For the second option, the process flow is as follows:

  • EPS looks for all the folders set up in the selected libraries
  • in each folder, EPS compiles a list of all the files matching the search pattern
  • for each file, EPS deletes any existing index, and builds the index again
  • EPS then searches for the entered words/phrases in the list of files it compiled in step 2 above

For the third option, the process flow is as follows:

  • EPS looks for all the folders set up in the selected libraries
  • in each folder, EPS compiles a list of all the files matching the search pattern
  • EPS then searches for the entered words/phrases only in the files where an index has already been created

For the fourth option, the process flow is as follows:

  • EPS searches for the entered words/phrases in its existing index.

The point to note is that in the first 3 options, Easy PDF Search only returns results from files that exist.  If a PDF file has already been indexed previously but no longer exists, EPS will not search the index of that file.

Searching an existing index in Easy PDF Search

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Easy PDF Search indexes your PDF files and allows you to search your files for keywords.  When you perform a search in Easy PDF Search, it first scans your library paths for PDF files.  New and modified files will be indexed, then only existing files are searched.

In some situations, you may not have the source PDF files with you, but only the Easy PDF Search index database.  Or you may not want Easy PDF Search to spend time scanning for existing files, but just want to search for keywords in the already indexed files.

In Easy PDF Search 2.1, we added the option to skip the file scanning process and directly search the existing index.  This is available under the Options menu.

Selecting the Search index only option will search the existing index and return the results, regardless of whether the file exists.

To recap the 4 options:

  • Index new files only
    This option scans the search folders defined in each library, and indexes only the new and modified files it finds, then searches for keywords in those indexed files that exist.
  • index all files
    This option scans the search folders defined in each library and indexes all the files it finds, deleting any existing index for each file.  It then searches for keywords in those indexed files that exist.
  • search only indexed files
    This option scans the search folders defined in each library for files, and searches for keywords in those indexed files.  It ignores any new or modified files.
  • search index only
    This option performs searches on the existing index, and does not scan to check if the indexed files exist.

 

Easy PDF Search – updating the PDF file locations

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You may sometimes move your PDF files to another folder, and you don’t want to have to re-index all the files again in Easy PDF Search.

For e.g. you may have one or more libraries that indexes the files in g:\pdflib\.  Let’s say you’ve now moved all the PDF files to a larger drive, say h:\pdfs\.  If you don’t want to have to reindex all the files again, do this.

Select the Tools > Manage library paths item from the main menu.

Easy PDF Search then displays the list of libraries and the paths associated with each library.

As our PDF files have moved from g:\pdflib\ to h:\pdfs\, we need to make the change to our libraries’ paths.

Once you save the new values, DICOM Search will update all the details of the indexed files accordingly, so files previously indexed in g:\pdflib\ will have their source locations updated to h:\pdfs\, if they now exist in h:\pdfs\.  The search path for the libraries will also be updated.

In this way, you do not need to reindex all the files that you have moved.

Moving your Easy PDF Search database

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Sometimes you may want to move your Easy PDF Search database to a faster or bigger drive, or to another computer, without having to rebuild the index again.

Moving the database file

Select the File > Settings item from the main menu.

The path value indicates the location where the database file is stored.

In that folder, you should see 3 files.  EPSDataFile.db3  is the main database file.  The other 2 files are support files, and only exist when Easy PDF Search is active.

Enter the new folder where you want to store the database file in.

Once you save the new settings, Easy PDF Search will then copy the database file from the old folder to the new folder.

Search PDF using Easy PDF Search

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Easy PDF Search lets you search PDF files you own fast.  Unlike other PDF tools, Easy PDF Search will create an index of your PDF file contents.  When you search the file for the first time, Easy PDF Search will index the files automatically.  Subsequent searches will use the index, which can be up to 100x faster than normal searches.

This guide gets you started on configuring Easy PDF Search to search PDF files, but broadly the steps are as follows:

Create a library

A library is a collection of PDF files.  You must create at least one library, and you can create as many libraries as you want.

A library tells Easy PDF Search where your PDF files are located.

When you search PDF files for words, you can choose to search all or some of your libraries.  This gives you great flexibility in limiting your search to specific sets of files.

The first time that Easy PDF Search searches your PDF files, it creates an index of the files’ contents.  On subsequent searches, it uses the indexes directly, which can speed up the search up to 100x faster.

If your PDF files get updated, Easy PDF Search will automatically recreate the indexes for that file.

Enter your search words/phrases

Enter one or more search words/phrases to search for.  This guide provides more details on how you can perform both simple and advanced searches.  Basically, advanced searches allow you to use operators to refine the search.

For e.g. entering the words

data consistency and data concurrency 

will return all files containing the words data, consistency, and, and concurrency.  Entering it in double quotes

“data consistency and data concurrency”

will return all files containing the phrase data consistency and data concurrency.  Entering it this way

“data consistency” OR “data concurrency”

will return all files containing the phrase data consistency or data concurrency.  Entering

“data consistency” AND “data concurrency”

will return only files containing the phrases data consistency and data concurrency. Entering

“data consistency” NOT “data concurrency”

will return only files containing the phrase data consistency and does not contain the phrase data concurrency.  Finally, entering

NEAR(“data consistency”, “concurrency”, 20)

will return files containing the phrase data consistency and where the word concurrency appears 20 words before or after that phrase.

Review the search results

The search results are summarized, and the pages where the search words/phrases are listed.

Expanding the file summary will list out all the pages where the words/phrases were located together with the number of occurrences.

Clicking on a listed page will display the page from your PDF file and the search words/phrases are highlighted.

Beyond just viewing your search results, you can perform additional tasks like combining all the pages from the search results into a single PDF file.  Using the search results, you can also  extract the pages into separate PDF files, extract text and images from those pages, and export those PDF pages as images.

Download a free 14-day trial now and experience how Easy PDF Search makes searching your PDF files so much easier and faster.

See also:

Speeding up searches in Easy PDF Search

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When you enter words to search for in Easy PDF Search, you need to be mindful of whether you want to search by each individual word, or the phrase.

For e.g. if you enter the following:

Easy PDF Search will search your library of PDF files for pages that contain the word data, or consistency, or and, or concurrency.  This will slow down the search process significantly because of the inclusion of the word and, which is a common word.  The search will complete faster if you omit the word and.

If however you wanted to search for pages that contain the phrase data consistency and data concurrency, you need to enclose the entire phrase in double quotes i.e.

Now only your PDF files that contain the phrase data consistency and data concurrency are returned by the search.  The search will also complete faster because you are no longer searching for individual words.

You may also have wanted to search your PDF files for pages that contain the word data consistency or data concurrency.  You can do this in one of two ways.  Either enter each phrase on a separate line e.g.

or use the OR operator this way:

Both methods of entering the search phrases will return the same results.  The only difference lies in how the results are displayed.  In the first method, each phrase is displayed under separate headings.

while using the OR operator displays the results under a single heading.

So in summary, a phrase search is faster than a multiple word search, and if you must perform a multiple word search, omitting common words will speed up the search.

 

Using Easy PDF Search

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Easy PDF Search helps you search for words or phrases in your PDF files.  You can also search for values in the file annotations and attributes.

To start off, enter the words or phrases you want to search in the search window.  There are a few ways you can refine your search terms, like conditional searching using AND and OR operators, using NOT to exclude words, using NEAR to perform proximity searches, all described here.

For now, let’s just keep things simple, and search for the word performance or monitoring.

Next, we need to tell Easy PDF Search which files to search in.  To do that, we need to define one or more libraries.  Each library can contain one or more paths and search patterns.

You can define generic paths like this:

or more specific search patterns like this:

Once you have defined your libraries, select the libraries you want to include in your search.

In this way, you can easily choose which paths you want to search in if you group files of similar topics into the same libraries.

Easy PDF Search will then index your files where necessary, and display the search results in the main window. Click on any of the items to open the relevant file or page.

Easy PDF Search will highlight all the search terms found on that page.

With the search results, you can now perform various tasks like compiling all the results into a single PDF file, extracting text and images from the pages, converting the pages to images etc.

You can also review your search history and recall the results of those searches.

You can also use the search parameters from your search history to perform a new search if you have new or modified files in your libraries.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Search now, and see how it lets you work faster and opens up new possibilities on how you can work with your PDF files.

See also:

 

Searching PDF content using Easy PDF Search

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When using Easy PDF Search to search for words or phrases, here are a few pointers.

When you enter a single word to search, Easy PDF Search will return all pages containing one or more occurrences of that word.

If you enter two words on different lines e.g.

Easy PDF Search will return all files containing the words monitoring or quality.

Likewise, if you enter multiple words e.g.

all files containing any of the entered words will be returned.

If you enter two words on the same line e.g.

only files containing the first and second words will be returned.

If you enter two lines of two words each e.g.

then only files containing monitoring and sensors or arduino and quality are returned.

You can also search for phrases in place of words.  To search for phrases, enclose the words in double quotes e.g.

This will then return only files containing the phrase monitoring quality.  The rules for words described above apply to phrases too.  E.g.

will return all files containing the phrase monitoring quality and the word arduino.

Refining your search using AND, OR, NOT

When you enter two words on a line to search for e.g.

there’s an implicit AND operator added i.e.

You can use the OR operator if you want the search results to return files containing either of the two words e.g.

You can also use the NOT operator to exclude files containing specific words.  E.g.

will return all files containing the phrase monitoring quality and do not contain the word  arduino.

You can combine multiple operators and words to refine your search e.g.

Use parentheses to make it clear the order in which to apply the search operators and words e.g.

Note that the AND, OR, NOT operators must always be written in uppercase.

Prefix search

Instead of complete words, you can also use prefix searches e.g.

This will then return all files containing words starting with monitor e.g. monitoring, monitored, monitors, etc.

Proximity searches

Proximity searches allow you to search for 2 or more words based on their proximity, using the NEAR operator.  E.g.

will return all files containing the words monitoring and performance when they appear within 20 words of each other.  If you omit the distance value e.g.

a default distance value of 10 words is used.  Note that common words like the, and, it etc are ignored when determining proximity.

Searching by file and by page

By default, Easy PDF Search will treat the entire PDF file as one single page.  Instead of applying the search criteria on the entire file, you can choose to search by individual pages.  For e.g. entering this

will return all files containing the word performance but not optimization.  If however you choose to search by page

then only individual pages containing the word performance but not optimization are returned.

Searching PDF attributes and date values

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Each PDF file has a set of common attributes, like author, creator, title, subject, producer etc.  Using Easy PDF Search, you can easily search for PDF files with attributes matching one or more values.

If you want to see which of your PDF files contain attributes, just enter a wildcard search value and select the attributes you’re interested to see.

Easy PDF Search will then return all files containing values for the attribute types you selected.

You can also search on the PDF creation and modification date.  All dates are stored in the format |year|month|date|hour|minute|second

For e.g. July 27, 2010 9:30 PM will be stored as 20100727093000

To search for files created or modified on a specific date, we enter the date elements and use a wildcard for the time elements.  For e.g. to search for files created on March 23, 2009, we would enter the following:

Easy PDF Search will then return all files created on that date, regardless of the time value.

 

Searching PDF keywords

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You can search PDF keywords for specific values using Easy PDF Search.

If you enter a value without any wildcard symbols, e.g.

then Easy PDF Search will only return files containing only the keyword urgent or performance.

In most cases, the keywords attribute contain multiple words e.g.

urgent attention required for performance

In these cases, you would need to use the wildcard symbols to find files containing your keywords e.g.

To see all keywords for your files, just enter a wildcard character e.g.

Easy PDF Search will then return all pages containing keywords.