Adobe Acrobat XI - Manual (Page 493)

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Searching and indexing
Last updated 1/14/2015
• Remove extended characters, such as accented characters and non-English characters, from file and folder names.
(The font used by the Catalog feature does not support character codes 133 through 159.)
• Don’t use deeply nested folders or path names that exceed 256 characters for indexes that will be searched by Mac
OS users.
• If you use Mac OS with an OS/2 LAN server, configure IBM®LAN Server Macintosh (LSM) to enforce MS-DOS file-
naming conventions, or index only FAT (File Allocation Table) volumes. (HPFS [High Performance File System]
volumes may contain long unretrievable filenames.)
If the document structure includes subfolders that you don’t want indexed, you can exclude them during the
indexing process.
Adding metadata to document properties (Acrobat Pro)
To make a PDF easier to search, you can add file information, called metadata, to the document properties. (You can
see the properties for the currently open PDF by choosing File > Properties, and clicking the Description tab.)
(Windows) You can also enter and read the data properties information from the desktop. Right-click the document in
Windows Explorer, choose Properties, and click the PDF tab. Any information you type or edit in this dialog box also
appears in the Document Properties Description when you open the file.
When adding data for document properties, consider the following recommendations:
• Use a good descriptive title in the Title field. The filename of the document should appear in the Search Results
dialog box.
• Always use the same option (field) for similar information. For example, don’t add an important term to the Subject
option for some documents and to the Keywords option for others.
• Use a single, consistent term for the same information. For example, don’t use biology for some documents and life
sciences for others.
• Use the Author option to identify the group responsible for the document. For example, the author of a hiring policy
document might be the Human Resources department.
• If you use document part numbers, add them as keywords. For example, adding doc#=m234 in Keywords could
indicate a specific document in a series of several hundred documents on a particular subject.
• Use the Subject or Keywords option, either alone or together, to categorize documents by type. For example, you
might use status report as a Subject entry and monthly or weekly as a Keywords entry for a single document.
If you already have specialized training in Adobe PDF, you can define custom data fields, such asDocument Type,
Document Number, and Document Identifier, when you create the index. This is recommended only for advanced
users and is not covered in AcrobatComplete Help.
Create an index for a collection (Acrobat Pro)
When you build a new index, Acrobat creates a file with the .pdx extension and a new support folder, which contains
one or more files with .idx extensions. The IDX files contain the index entries. All of these files must be available to
users who want to search the index.