Highlighting search terms automatically in pdf viewer

[davids47949196]

We are building a custom web application that will allow us to search pdf textual content that is stored in a database.  Mostly the user will search for terms, we'll display a list of documents containing the term, and we'll display small snippets of text.  Occasionally the user will want to open the relevant pdf document and view it as a pdf either in that browser window, or in a separate window.  When we open the pdf we want to automatically highlight the search term(s) that was found.  Event better would be a list of the pages where the term was found, displayed in the margin, just like Acrobat's free reader does now.

Is this possible?  This would be an internal enterprise app and we're willing to purchase software to make this work.  Thanks.

[try67]

It's possible, but not with Acrobat, which is not a server application, nor any other Adobe application I'm aware of.

I've developed various standalone tools that do exactly that (although not the list part, but that can certainly be added). If you're interested in hiring someone to develop this tool for you and help you integrate it in your larger workflow feel free to contact me privately (try6767 at gmail.com) and we could discuss it further.

[davids47949196]

Thanks.  I was hoping this was a fairly common requirement, especially in government, and that this would have been solved by now.  How are people searching large corpuses of pdf files?  I recall that with Acrobat you could on a small scale search a folder containing pdf files and you'd get a list of hits and then you'd click on one and it would open the corresponding pdf.  At least that's my memory of this. 

[try67]

Sure, but that's locally. You're talking about a web-based solution, which is a completely different beast. The searching part is not difficult. Most search-engines will do it for you. The trickier part is highlighting the results in the PDF that you serve back to the user.

[davids47949196]

I guess what seems odd is the fact that the API for pdf doesn't include the ability to say "open this file for viewing, and pass in this search string to execute after opening". 

[try67 · Accepted solution]

That might be a possibility of the application (and Acrobat does indeed offer similar things through the Open Parameters API), but it's not something that is usually a part of the file format specification.