Find text in PDF and print the pages it is found on

How much experience do you have with JavaScript and Acrobat?

Text extraction - or more exactly how successful you will be to extract text reliably - depends highly on the "inner" quality of your PDF files. This does not mean that a file does not look good on screen or when printed, it means that a file may not have all the information that Acrobat needs to extract text. At the end, the characters you see "drawn" on a PDF page are just that, drawings. Acrobat needs a table that allows it to convert these "drawings" back to Unicode characters (usually called the ToUnicode table). If a PDF generator did not include that table in the document for every font used, then you cannot extract text.

Now let's take a look at what support Acrobat's JavaScript has for text extraction. The only way you can get access to the text in a document is by using the "word finder". This is a few API routines in the Doc object that allow you to get the number of words on a page, and then iterate over all words on that page (and potentially get the location for each word).

Take a look at these two API documentation pages for more information about this functionality:

Doc.getPageNumWords(): http://livedocs.adobe.com/acrobat_sdk/11/Acrobat11_HTMLHelp/JS_API_AcroJS.89.494.html

Doc.getPageNthWord(): http://livedocs.adobe.com/acrobat_sdk/11/Acrobat11_HTMLHelp/JS_API_AcroJS.89.492.html

There are some sample scripts in the documentation.

Now to the reasons why this may not work for you: A "word" as far as this word finder is concerned is a collection of letters. As soon as you throw in punctuation marks or numbers, Acrobat will have a problem. So the term "test-abc" will result in two words: test and abc.

The number 100.12 will be reported as 100 and 12 - without any way of knowing if there was anything in between these two words that would connect them to a decimal number.

So, in theory you just have to iterate over all words on a page and see if one of them is "Total" - if you find the first total, just add the current page number to an array of pages that contain the term "Total", and return that array once you've processed all pages.

Thanks for your response!   I will not run into the scenarios you spoke about regarding dashes and decimal points for what I am trying to accomplish.  I am basically just searching for 1 word, "TOTAL" which will only show up in specific places on the reports I will be running against.

However, I do not have much experience at all with Javascript and Acrobat.  Most of my experience is with VBA and SQL.  I am just very unfamiliar with coding in Javascript.  Could you help me with the code I need to add the page numbers to an array, and then to print them?  

I would really appreciate your help; it would save my department a ton of time performing this tedious task.  

Thanks again!

Unfortunately, that would take a bit more time than I have right now. If you want to dive into JavaScript yourself, it's not too complicated to pick up if you are already familiar with programming in general.

Actually, I did find some time. Take a look here:

http://khkonsulting.com/2014/04/extract-pdf-pages-based-content/

That is a lot of help.  Thank you!  Just my last step is to print that newly created document.  If I add the line to print, it wants to print the original document, not the new one.

Does this need to be 2 seperate actions altogether or can it be combined into 1?

Thanks

Perfect!  Thanks for all your help.  I really appreciate it!