Collect the active supplier contracts folder, ensure each contract is the latest signed version, save the completed fi…
Open your PDF document in Adobe Acrobat.
Go to the Tools pane and select Document Processing.
Click Full Text Index with Catalog.
In the Catalog dialog, click New Index.
Click Add and select your PDF file, then click OK.
Click Build to start creating the index.
Choose a location and filename for the .pdx index file and click Save.
Wait for the indexing process to complete, then click Close.
Best practiceIf your PDF contains scanned images, use Acrobat’s OCR feature before indexing to ensure all text is searchable.
After building the index, you can use the Advanced Search feature to quickly search the full text of your indexed PDF.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
A PDF index is like a special map that Acrobat builds for a group of PDF files. Instead of looking through each document page by page when you search, Acrobat uses this map to find your words almost instantly. It's much faster because the index already knows where all the words are located, including those in comments, bookmarks, and attachments.
Yes, if your scanned contracts have been processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to make the text searchable, then a PDF index will still be very helpful. The index works on the actual text content. If your scanned images are not yet searchable, you would first need to run OCR on them in Acrobat to convert the images of text into real, searchable text before creating the index for fast retrieval.
You should use Catalog to build an index when you need to search across many PDF files. The regular search bar is good for one or a few open documents. But for a large collection, building an index once with Catalog makes all future searches across that whole collection dramatically faster and more complete. It also searches more things like comments and metadata, not just the body text.