Update: Using Acrobat 9 and a similar technique, you can highlight all the words at once. See Searching and Marking Multiple Words in a PDF.
Acrobat has powerful search capabilities, but one feature which is lacking is persistent highlighting via search. I discovered an interesting workaround to this problem after pondering this email message from a customer:
We have a fairly large case where I pulled up 7,000 pages of shift logs. I need to find select words throughout the document so I am using the word search to go through all the pages and pull out those pages that reference the word I am searching. I have some questions for you:
1) When the word search is done and I am looking at the document, all the words that I searched are highlighted in blue. However, when I print them off they are not highlighted anymore. Is there anyway to make it so those words are highlighted and will stay highlighted when I print them off and are easy to spot?
2) One of the words we are needing to search for our discovery produced over 3,000 pages. Obviously I really do not want to print off all of those pages. Is there anyway to print off a summary of where that word is on each page without printing off all 3,000 pages?
I scratched my head for a bit, but I found a great workaround which takes advantage of Acrobat 8’s Redaction feature. The end result is a persistently highlighted document like this:
Read on to learn about the workaround in easy step-by-step instructions.
Acrobat 8 Professional can mark multiple words as part of a redaction workflow. While redaction is permanent and irrevocable, it would be virtually impossible to apply them accidentally.
Highlight In Adobe Reader
Don’t worry— until you apply redactions, they are simply Acrobat annotations. If you accidentally click the Apply Redaction button a stern warning message is presented. If you accidentally click OK, Acrobat will ask you to rename your file.
Once the words are highlighted, Acrobat can flexibly allow you to view, delete or summarize the comments.
Highlighting Multiple Words throughout a PDF
To persistently highlight multiple words in a PDF, follow these steps:
Working with the Highlighted Words
Once Redaction highlights have been applied, you can use the Comments Panel to sort through the marked words. Here’s how:
Summarizing Comments
Once words are highlighted, it is easy to create a comment summary which creates a new document containing only the pages with the marked words.
Helpful Tips
You can easily highlight, underline, and cross out text in a document in Adobe Acrobat Creative Suite 5 by using the Highlight Text Tool in the Comment & Markup toolbar, which you can access by clicking the Comment option in the Tasks toolbar. You can then choose Show the Comment & Markup Tools.
You can also access the Comment & Markup toolbar by choosing View→ Toolbars→Comment & Markup.
The Comment & Markup toolbar in Acrobat Creative Suite 5.
The Highlight Text, Cross Out Text, and Underline Text tools provide the same functionality and options that are available with the Text Edits tool, but with easier access. If you want to delete the highlighted, crossed-out, or underlined formatting to your text, just click the formatted area and hit the Delete or Backspace key. Your text will remain, but the formatting will disappear.
To highlight text, follow these steps:
To underline text, follow these steps:
To cross out text, follow these steps:
Legal Professionals often need to search across a large number of documents. Finding a key fact, name or term is an important part of how you will apply your knowledge to a case.
For example, recently a paralegal sent me this email:
An attorney I work with just gave me a list of about 50 words and phrases as part of a case. I need to mark these terms each time I find them in my case documents. Help! Is there a way I can list all of the search words in a PDF?
While many folks have discovered the Search functionality in Acrobat, Acrobat 9 and below do not offer the ability to save searches or report the results.
Oddly, the only tool in Acrobat that allows you to search for terms and mark them in a PDF is part of the Search and Redact feature. This will add a mark to the page around the search term.
I wrote about using this technique in my previous article Highlighting Multiple Words in a PDF Document.
In Acrobat 9 Pro, it is possible to highlight multiple search terms using this same technique and you can do so “jiffy quick”.
In this article I’ll show you how to: Guitar rig 5 metalcore presets.
Getting Ready
Before starting, it is helpful to change a preference to make it easier to work with the marked words.
Highlighting Multiple Words throughout a PDF
To persistently highlight multiple words in a PDF, follow these steps:
Working with the Highlighted Words
Once Redaction highlights have been applied, you can use the Comments Panel to sort through the marked words. Here’s how:
Summarizing Comments
Once words are highlighted, it is easy to create a comment summary which creates a new document containing only the pages with the marked words.
![]() Managing the Comments
Here are a few tips that will come in handy while managing the comments.
Seriously, Redaction Marks are Ugly. . .
Redaction Marks look different than standard highlights:
You may prefer the appearance of the standard highlights. I do!
Fortunately, my colleague Joel Geraci offers a free script called Redact to Highlight and Back, which convert redaction markups to standard Acrobat annotations.
Prevent changes to your marked words . . .
If you flatten the document, this will burn the highlights into the document.
See my article Add a Flatten Document Menu Item to Acrobat to learn how.
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