About indexing PDF documents

An index stores the content of many PDF files in a compact way, suited to easy search and retrieval.

Index icon Go to Advanced Processing > Process > Index and select Create Full Text Indexes from the list to build a new index or update an existing one.

You can index PDF documents written in languages that use Roman characters or Asian characters (Chinese, Japanese or Korean). You can index not only the document text, but also bookmarks, comments, attachments, digital signatures, form fields, metadata, and other custom document properties.

You can build an index file from all the PDF files in a set of folders you define. Before starting, select a folder where the index will be stored. Indexing proceeds in the background. A small index definition file is created, with the extension zpi. This refers to the index files that are stored in an automatically created subfolder that has the same name as the zpi file, with a suffix of _index.

These search indexes are not embedded in the PDF files; to make them available to other users, you must save them to a shared location. Use a different command in the same list to create an embedded index for a single document so that it is truly portable.