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Participant
July 29, 2016
Answered

Automatically highlight phrases in document

  • July 29, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 26502 views

I am trying to do two things with PDFs on Acrobat Pro DC.

1. I want to be able to enter a phrase (or multiple phrases, if possible) and have them all automatically highlighted throughout the document. (And, when I print the document, I want the highlight to be visible.)

2. This is trickier, but I'll throw this out there in case there's a solution. The documents I'm doing this for are financial statements. So, one phrase I may want  highlighted could be "Deposit from Chase Bank Checking". Every time that phrase appears, it would be automatically highlighted via the above. Immediately following the phrase would be the amount of the deposit. Ideally, I'd like the program to automatically also highlight the deposit amount. But, this amount would vary each time. So, the only way I can imagine this working is if you could somehow teach Adobe to find the desired phrase, and then automatically highlight the entire line (or highlight until it finds a dollar sign followed by a number.)

#2 is probably not going to be possible; but, if I could just get #1 to work, that would be great.

If it helps, there was an old Action that apparently did this is Adobe X:

Searching and Marking Multiple Words in a PDF

But, I can't get this to work in Pro DC.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer JR Boulay

Hi.

You should try this free Action : Find and Highlight Words

Available on this page: https://acrobatusers.com/actions-exchange

1 reply

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 29, 2016

1. This can be done with a script, like this one I've developed:

Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat -- Highlight All Instances of a Word or Phrase in a PDF

If you want to use a list of search terms that's also possible, but for that a stand-alone tool is probably a better option, which is also something I've developed.

2. That's most likely possible as well. The easiest way is to tell the script just to highlight the next word after the match, but another option is to use a regular expression to identify the entire pattern as a whole. That too can be done using my stand-alone tool.

JR Boulay
Community Expert
JR BoulayCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
July 30, 2016

Hi.

You should try this free Action : Find and Highlight Words

Available on this page: https://acrobatusers.com/actions-exchange

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe
JoelWhyAuthor
Participant
August 1, 2016

That did it, thanks!!!