Searching a document with search.query

Question

I wrote a working script to compare every word in a document to a list of words I want to flag. It works but is incredibly slow. I know that Acrobat has an indexing feature. Maybe I can tap into that?

I've been playing with search.query, but it doesn't look like it actually returns anything. Please don't tell me to look in the manual :-)... it isn't described there much.

My loop is:

for (var i = 0; i < currentDoc.numPages; i++ )

{

...

for (var j = 0; j < currentDoc.getPageNumWords(i); j++)

{

....

for (var n = 0; n < wordItem.length; n++) // my list of terms I want to look for

{

If found, comment-highlight the word.

}

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Rick

Joel Geraci · Accepted Answer

The method search.query is a way to programmatically initiate a search. The results are available in the search panel, not to JavaScript. Unfortunately, the only way to locate words and highlight them is the way you are doing it.

That said, you can make your code FAR more efficient by not trying to add a highlight annotation while you are looping through the words. That really slows down Acrobat.

Instead, create an array of arrays for the word indices that match the terms you want to highlight. Then after all words have been identified, loop through that new array and add the highlights. Your array might look like this...

var wordsToHighlight = [

[4,15,21],

[],

[19,22,25,85]

]

...so the first page (index 0 of the array) would have words 4,15, and 21 highlighted. The second page gets no highlights and the third page... well, you get the idea.

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