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Search parameter passing broken in Reader/Acrobat 9?

Forum Index > General Acrobat Topics > Search parameter passing broken in Reader/Acrobat 9?
2009-10-27 11:07:35
dharding
Registered: Sep 11 2009
Posts: 4

I've been ripping my hair out trying to figure out whether things are broken at my end or Adobe's.

We have a library of PDFs online, and use a 3rd party software package to create the search database. Search results are returned with links to the individual PDFs ala Google, and the #search='searchterm' parameter is appended to the URLs, thus passing the search term to Adobe's internal search mechanism, and the search results are automatically highlighted within Adobe reader.

This functionality appears to now be be gone with Adobe 9.

I have tried going into my preferences within Adobe and enabling 'Enable search highlights from external highlight server' but this does nothing.

I originally thought the problem was at my end, but I can access the same URLs on machines with Adobe v7 and v8 and those work exactly as expected. It's only in v9 that this functionality is destroyed.

1. Why?

2. How can this be fixed?

We currently have a resource archive where the search function is now utterly useless thanks to this.

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.2, Windows
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2009-11-02 10:43:08
#1
dharding
Registered: Sep 11 2009
Posts: 4
Bump. Anyone?
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2009-11-18 12:17:23
#2
dharding
Registered: Sep 11 2009
Posts: 4
Trying again...
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2010-02-20 09:01:33
#3
jharms
Registered: Feb 20 2010
Posts: 3
I am experiencing the same problem.
The following URL works differently in Reader 9 than in Reader 8:
my.pdf#search='this word'

With Reader 8, the search sidebar opens and searches for all instances of "this" and "word".
With Reader 9, the sidebar opens and searches for " 'this word' ". (That is, the search includes the quotes.)

I tried changing the URL by dropping the quotes:
my.pdf#search=this word

This time, it works in Reader 9 as expected, but it no longer works in Reader 8.
In Reader 8, it searches for all instances of " his " and " wor ". In other words, it strips the first and last character of the search query (as if it were assuming that they would be the quote characters).

As a workaround, is it possible for a script on the PHP page that contains the URL to determine which version of the Reader plug-in the user has installed? If so, I could get the script to drop the quote characters when constructing the URL.
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2010-02-20 09:57:09
#4
jharms
Registered: Feb 20 2010
Posts: 3
After looking into it further, I found that it works the same in Reader 8 and Reader 9 if you use double-quotes rather than single-quotes around the word list.

It means that my PHP script that creates the URL must use single quotes for the link (to allow for the double-quotes around the search terms).
Example: Link Text
Jake
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