Advise how to convert several semesters of scanned essays into clean, searchable text that preserves student anonymity…
Place all PDFs you want to include in the search index into a single folder on your computer.
Open Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Go to the Tools view and select Catalog.
In the Catalog panel, click New Index.
In the Index Definition dialog, click Add Folder and select the folder containing your PDFs.
Optionally, adjust the advanced options for the index (such as custom stop words or include/exclude subfolders) as needed.
Click Build to start creating the index.
Choose a location and filename for your .pdx index file and click Save.
Wait for the indexing process to complete, then click Close when finished.
Best practiceFor best performance, keep your PDF collection and the .pdx index file together in the same folder so users can easily search across all documents.
After building the index, use the Advanced Search feature and select 'Use Index' to search across all indexed PDFs at once.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
A PDF Index, created by the Catalog feature, is like a special map for all your PDF files. It lists every word and where it is found. This matters because without an index, Acrobat has to read every single file each time you search, which is very slow for many documents. With an index, it just looks at the map, making searches almost instant across your whole collection.
Yes, a PDF Index (Catalog) can find text in scanned PDFs, but only if the scanned PDFs have already had Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied to them. OCR turns the image of text into selectable and searchable text. If your scanned PDFs are just images, the index won't find text in them until OCR is performed on those files first.
You should use Catalog to create a PDF Index when you have many PDF files you search often. The regular search bar searches each file one by one, which is slow for a large collection. Catalog builds a single index file that covers all your PDFs, including comments, bookmarks, and metadata. This makes future searches across the entire collection dramatically faster and more complete, as it only needs to check the index, not every file.