Legal asked for a single searchable file of our signed dealer agreements so they can check export and tariff clauses b…
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 is like a super-fast table of contents for many PDF files. It matters because without an index, Acrobat has to open and read each PDF one by one to find your words, which takes a very long time. With an index, Acrobat already knows where everything is, making searches across huge collections almost instant.
For a very large collection of signed agreements, the best way to make searching fast is to use the 'Catalog' feature in Adobe Acrobat Pro. This feature builds a full-text index (.pdx file) for your entire collection. Once the index is created, future searches will be dramatically faster because Acrobat doesn't have to re-read every file each time you search. It also helps find words in comments, bookmarks, and attachments.
| Feature | Searching a Single PDF | Searching a PDF Index (Catalog) |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Good for one document, but slow if you do it many times for many files. | Very fast, even for thousands of documents, after the index is built. |
| Coverage | Searches body text, layers, form fields, and signatures in that one file. | Searches body text, layers, form fields, signatures, comments, bookmarks, tags, metadata, and attachments across all indexed files. |
| Setup | No special setup needed, just use the search bar. | Requires building a .pdx index file using 'Catalog' in Acrobat Pro first. |
You should use 'Catalog' to create a PDF index because it saves a lot of time and gives you a more complete search. Searching each file individually is very slow, especially with many documents. The index is built once, and then all your searches become almost instant across the whole collection. Also, the index covers more than just the main text; it also includes comments, bookmarks, tags, metadata, and even attached files, giving you a much deeper search capability that individual file searches might miss.