how to search a PDF for Greek characters?

[Tom Roche]

How can one search a PDF for occurrences of Greek (or, for that
matter, any non-ASCII) characters? Note that I'm using Adobe Reader
8.1.4 for winXP but am open to using other tools.

I'm researching a mathematical model (i.e. a collection of
differential equations) published in an article in a scientific
journal. The article is as usual available online as a PDF. The author
appears to have defined a few, but unfortunately not all, of the
parameters in his equations. Hence I'd like to search that article,
and some related ones, for those parameters. I know how to search PDFs
(both the current document and folders containing PDFs) using Acrobat.

Unfortunately some of these parameters are Greek letters, e.g. alpha.
If I copy an instance of the Greek character alpha from the document
into the text box for the search dialog, it gets converted to the
ASCII character 'a', and it searches for instances of that ASCII
character, which is not what I want.

Apologies if this is a FAQ, but I searched this group and the Acrobat
help, as well as googling.

Feel free to reply to me directly as well as to the group,
TIA, Tom Roche <Tom_...@pobox.com>

[Engineer@pnb.retired_1987 Don Schmidt]

Will Adobe Reader allow you to change the language to Greek in the
Preferences? If so, you might give it a try.

I don't use Adobe products.

--
Don - PDF-XChange Pro®/PDF-XChange Viewer Pro®
Vancouver, USA

"Tom Roche" <tlr...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:d78516ab-8e25-4d9d...@c12g2000yqc.googlegroups.com...

[ken]

In article <d78516ab-8e25-4d9d-8a7c-a1224aa53088
@c12g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>, tlr...@gmail.com says...

> How can one search a PDF for occurrences of Greek (or, for that
> matter, any non-ASCII) characters?

Unicode. The 'find' dialog in Acrobat uses Unicode characters, all you
need to do is type the character you want in the find dialog.

If you can't find any other way, copy & paste the character into the
find dialog and search that way, IIRC that works too.

Ken

[[Jongware]]

"Tom Roche" <tlr...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:d78516ab-8e25-4d9d...@c12g2000yqc.googlegroups.com...

> How can one search a PDF for occurrences of Greek (or, for that
> matter, any non-ASCII) characters? Note that I'm using Adobe Reader
> 8.1.4 for winXP but am open to using other tools.
>
> I'm researching a mathematical model (i.e. a collection of
> differential equations) published in an article in a scientific
> journal. The article is as usual available online as a PDF. The author
> appears to have defined a few, but unfortunately not all, of the
> parameters in his equations. Hence I'd like to search that article,
> and some related ones, for those parameters. I know how to search PDFs
> (both the current document and folders containing PDFs) using Acrobat.
>
> Unfortunately some of these parameters are Greek letters, e.g. alpha.
> If I copy an instance of the Greek character alpha from the document
> into the text box for the search dialog, it gets converted to the
> ASCII character 'a', and it searches for instances of that ASCII
> character, which is not what I want.

Adding to Ken, it's possible the original font used did not use a Unicode font
for Greek at all, but something like (old) Symbol. I.e., to get an alpha, type
an 'a' and set the font... In that case, there's not very much you can do about
it.
If the Greek characters use a unique font: With Acrobat Professional, you can
search for this specific font. Go to Preflights and add a new check. Set it to
flag that specific font as "Warning" (or "Error" :-) and run the check. In the
results panel, you can click each of the occurrences and immediately see where
they occur.

[Jongware]