While Adobe Acrobat is a powerful (and pricey) program, Adobe Reader is free and allows you to perform several important research tasks. But if you haven't done so lately, you should upgrade your Adobe Reader to the latest version to make sure all of the tools are there for you. You can upgrade by clicking the Help menu option and selecting Check for Updates.
Adobe Reader has several important features that may be of help to you:
- Find: The Find tool in Reader allow you to locate specific words in the document. Options include "Find Previous" and "Find Next." However, there is another powerful feature of Find that most people don't know about.
- Full Reader Search: This rarely-used tool allows you to search every .pdf that you have stored on your computer or flash drive. It can be accessed by clicking the small arrow that follows the Find: command or by using the SHIFT + CTRL + F keyboard shortcut.
- Copy: New versions of Reader allow you to pick up text and copy it to a Clipboard or to another document. To do this, mark the text (hold left mouse button to highlight text), then right-click and select Copy. You can then move the text to your document and dump it there by right-clicking to select Paste.
- Bookmarks: Good creators of .pdf documents take the time to bookmark parts of longer documents, allowing readers to jump to the sections they are seeking using hyperlinks. If the document you are using has a little bookmark icon on the left, click it to view a table of links for this .pdf.
Note: All of these tools apply to recently created .pdf documents that have had OCR (optical character recognition) enabled. The earliest .pdfs were simply scanned objects, more like pictures or images than actual documents. None of these tools are available for those documents.
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