Embedded Index not working

[marcftl]

Hello,

Got an odd one.

My Client has a 14000+ page PDF Doc and has created an Embedded Index. Been doing this for years

Recently, some Win 10 PC's will use the Embedded Index and others still do a full search on the same Document.

No rhyme or reason.  All identical PC's.  We even logged in as the Administrator and the issue still exists.

Using all the latest Adobe Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader DC Software.

Any help would be extremely appreciated.

Thank you,

Marc Schlesinger

[burritos]

This appears to be because of APSB18-41. You can fix it with a registry edit: Steps to enable the embedded index in a PDF for searching?

However, I'm not sure if this was disabled because of a security issue. Can someone from Adobe please chime in on this? There's not much information about it. We have a department here that uses embedded index PDFs with thousands of pages and who also perform searches in them regularly. Before we push out a registry fix, we'd like to know if this is a security hazard or not.

[justinceo1]

Hi burritos, I'm in a similar situation but on mac platform and can't seem to get embedded index reenabled Embedded Index Issue, Help Needed. Have tried a couple things already

any advice?

[davidc42822553]

The instructions to turn it back on again didn't work for me on the Mac (haven't tested Windows), because they talk about a FeatureLockDown.plist file, and adding it doesn't work (for me anyway).

What did work for me (having Acrobat Pro 2017 and Reader DC) was to create the files (which were not present):

/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist

/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Reader.plist

and populate the appropriate key under the appropriate version (2017 or DC) in both of those, e.g., I created an com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

    <key>2017</key>

    <dict>

        <key>FeatureLockdown</key>

        <dict>

            <key>bToggleUseEmbeddedIndex</key>

            <true/>

        </dict>

    </dict>

</dict>

</plist>

Adobe presumably had a reason for disabling this feature, though APSB-18-41 does not explicitly mention it AFAICT, so be there may be a risk to re-enabling this feature if Adobe just turned it off rather than actually fixing the underlying code that uses the index and was possibly vulnerable.

[Klose]

hello there..

am not a programmer guy......am a little confused...well...after creatig those files, do i have to copy and past the programming stuff u mentioned in the plist files?....

or can u mail me the edited plist file or the files...

thank you

email- armuwaffaque@gmail.com

[Karlwild1]

It is crazy that Adobe tries to make the people change in the registry. They are not capable to release a fix for their really expensive software. Shame on Adobe for this behavior. They are already too big and too rich and a result out of this is that they don't care about their customers anymore. I personally will look for another solution and I'm sure I will find one. Why they do not disable viewing PDF's too? that would be handy. If Adobe feels offended would be good, because that's how I meant this comment. I know it doesn't help but maybe they think about it and change to the benefit of their customer. If I would have a say in this company I would fire the person who introduced this idiotic change.

[nonotmethanks · Accepted solution]

The Adobe instructions for using Windows regedit appear to be incorrect (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/enable-embedded-index-to-search-pdf.html)

Don't create a key, what worked for me is go to the referenced

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown

create instead a new DWORD named bToggleUseEmbeddedIndex and change the value to 1.

[Zenlifestyle]

Many thanks.  Creating a new DWORD as suggeted worked a treat.

[cyber0bill]

WOW! This worked GREAT!

I've got a ~6250 page PDF document for a car wiring diagram and service manual. On my main PC I ran OCR on the images of circuit diagrams and built an index, and it will INSTANTLY complete searches. However whenever I would use the tablet in my shop it would take a few minutes for each search, and I thought it was just because it was a slow PC. However I made this one tiny change and all of a sudden it is now instantly completing the searches on the tablet!

I can only assume that the registry setting is created anytime you create an index, which is why it didn't exist on my tablet (or my laptop - I checked!).  Thanks a hundred times over for this!!