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Joerg23925557yv99
Participant
April 6, 2022
Answered

Acrobat seems to start search after 3 characters resulting in findings containing these 3 character

  • April 6, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 5445 views

Acrobat start searching immediately after a certain amount (3??) characters are typed in the search field. Depending on document size it seems to ignore any additional typed in character which completes the 3 chars to the actual intended search string.

This results in

A) a delayed appearance of further typed characters in the search field, since Acrobat is busy with searching

B) search result containing only these first 3 typed characters ignoring following characters

Example:

search string is "diagram"

Acrobat starts search after "dia" is typed in and any further character "gram" is not seen since input is blocked. If search is finished or due to any other reason the input is accepted again, I can add missing character "gram". However as results I see "findings" like "diameter", "dialogue" and even "diagram" and obviously string "gram" all starting from 4th position is ignored.

 

Deleting last character(s) and typing in again dose not help. Search is not updated.

Only help is to cut and paste the whole search string (to be fast enough before autosearch starts).

 

How can I fix this, i.e. force Acrobat to start search if I hit the search button previous/next (or "Zurück" & "Weiter", because I have German edition)?

For a 10 pages document this might not be an issue but I deal with docs having 5000+ or 7000+ pages. This behaviour is annoying!

Correct answer Peter32090252qruu
quote

Probably because no-one else experienced this issue,


By @try67

 

I have experienced exactly the same issue for years on Windows 7 and Windows 10. I have a feeling that it started when reader was renamed to Adobe Reader DC, but I may be mistaken. I am seeing this right now on Windows 10 22H2 19045.3324 and Adobe Reader DC 23.003.20269. It does not need to be a document with multiple thousands of pages - I see it with relatively small documents about 500 pages.

 

It is really annoying to put it mildly.


I have also been striggling with this.  In preferences/search, turn off "Enable auto complete suggestions"   Seems to have made the issue go away for me.

2 replies

Participant
July 10, 2024

I agree, it's very annoying and at one point I was able to turn it off.  It's called dynamic search.  However, after an update this feature is back on and I can't find where to turn it off again.  I swear, programmers have no idea about real life.

 

Joerg23925557yv99
Participant
November 3, 2022

Half a year and no comment on that. Sitaution has not changed to become better.

Search seems to be even worse. A 60 page schematic containing mainly figures takes ~ 10 sec to search for a string. After wrap around the search starts again for the 10 sec delay even if search string was not changed.

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 3, 2022

Probably because no-one else experienced this issue, and it's a very odd one.

Also, you didn't provide very basic details, such as the Acrobat and OS versions.

Participant
March 14, 2025

I'm afraid this solution didn't work for me! I am pretty sure I hadn't this issue in previous versions.


Click Edit, Preferences, Search, and uncheck the "enable auto complete" checkbox.