Creat searchable pdfs out of InDesign5 to post on web using Acrobat Pro 9

[ashtonbeth]

Does anyone know how this is done? We are using InDesign CS5 for the PC, and these pdfs are posted by a client on their website and they need to be able to word search the pdf. I know nothing about how their website is created. Can anyone tell me what questions I should be asking the client and what type of pdf I need to be creating out of Indy 5.0?

[Sabrina The Turd Polisher]

 
I always ran the PDFs through the optimizer before I sent the "web" PDF to them. Are my settings still saved? I had one called EDT something or another.
Otherwise I have no idea as why it wouldn't be searchable? Especially out of Indy. I never had any trouble with that.
BTW, I'm kinda pissed your boss emailed me.
He needs to come off some goodies or cash if he wants me to think for him.  It's been 10 months! 

[Greg_Firestone]

Acrobat Pro has a feature that catalogs the PDF and creates an index file.

Go to Advanced/Document Processing/Full Text Index with Catalog.

Some search engines will pickup PDF text, but I assume you have a search option on the website.

Greg

[ashtonbeth]

I always ran the PDFs through the optimizer before I sent the "web" PDF to them. Are my settings still saved? I had one called EDT something or another.
Otherwise I have no idea as why it wouldn't be searchable? Especially out of Indy. I never had any trouble with that.
BTW, I'm kinda pissed your boss emailed me.
He needs to come off some goodies or cash if he wants me to think for him.  It's been 10 months! 

Hey Sab - 
Thanx for the mail! We have received a huge list of pdfs that aren't searchable, which are most. The issue is that they aren't searchable using the CLIENT'S website search engine. We can search the pdfs we created here fine using Acrobat. No obvious saved settings, but the printer who prints this job (and will not be named here :-) ) simply scanned the 6 years worth of issues instead of making true pdfs.

I think the bigger issue is knowing nothing about how the client publishes the pdfs on the web.
Oh, and I understand about the email. (wink!)

[Sabrina The Turd Polisher]

For the scanned ones, you'll need to "OCR recognize text" - I think that will work for the raster PDFs.

[Joe]

Yeah, scanned documents saved as a PDF are just images. No searchable options there without OCR'ing them first. If they were searchable PDFs I doubt the website search function will search them as you can't actually display them in a web page. The Acrobat addon for browsers actually displays them so the web search isn't going to work. If you buy one of the many available 3D flipbook software for displaying books/magazines/newspapers on the web, they do have searchable text but not sure then if the average run of the mill web search function would search them. The one we use has its own built in search function just for its own publication.

[Greg_Firestone]

The issue is that they aren't searchable using the CLIENT'S website search engine. We can search the pdfs we created here fine using Acrobat

but the printer who prints this job (and will not be named here :-) ) simply scanned the 6 years worth of issues instead of making true pdfs.

Can you clarify if the PDFs are raster scans or object based? You said you can search the PDFs in Acrobat so I assumed the PDFs had live text. But you then also mentioned them being scanned. The requirements will vary for each.

Greg

[ashtonbeth]

The issue is that they aren't searchable using the CLIENT'S website search engine. We can search the pdfs we created here fine using Acrobat

but the printer who prints this job (and will not be named here :-) ) simply scanned the 6 years worth of issues instead of making true pdfs.

Can you clarify if the PDFs are raster scans or object based? You said you can search the PDFs in Acrobat so I assumed the PDFs had live text. But you then also mentioned them being scanned. The requirements will vary for each.

Greg

Hi, Greg -
The pdfs we'll be working with from now forward are made from native files created using InDesign CS 5 for the PC - they aren't scans. The much older ones were scanned. Sorry to get you side-tracked. Any ideas?

[ashtonbeth]

For the scanned ones, you'll need to "OCR recognize text" - I think that will work for the raster PDFs.

Sab,
Thanks for the additional help....
The printing company is now going to provide us with the "print as" native files so we can start from them and make new pdfs.
I'm just trying to figure out what settings I should use. The files I've created are searchable in Acrobat, but when the client posts
them to their web site, some of them are searchable and some aren't...

*sigh* Happy Friday to you! :-)  Thanks for your input today....