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Adobe Acrobat SDK
Working with Acrobat Extended APIs
Developing Plug-ins and Applications
Search extended API 219
Search extended API
The Adobe Acrobat Search plug-in allows users to perform text searches in PDF documents. It adds menus,
menu items, a toolbar button, and a Search panel to the Acrobat viewer.
The Search plug-in exports a host function table (HFT) that contains methods that can be used by other
plug-ins. The HFT’s name is Search, and its version number is 0. To use the Search plug-in’s HFT, a plug-in
must include the header file SrchClls.h. The plug-in must also import the HFT using the
ASExtensionMgrGetHFT
method and assign the HFT returned by this call to a plug-in-defined global
variable named
gSearchHFT
. For information, see
“Working with Host Function Tables” on page 164
.
Acrobat 6.0 and later has two versions of the Search plug-in:
●
The Search plug-in uses a search engine licensed from Lextek International. Lextek can be contacted at
http://www.lextek.com
.
●
The Search5 plug-in uses a search engine licensed from Verity, Inc. Verity can be contacted at
http://www.verity.com
.
You can perform the following tasks with either version of the Search plug-in:
●
Create or delete indexes
●
Determine what indexes are available
●
Send queries to an existing index
You cannot use either version of the Search plug-in to directly obtain the results of a search, for
manipulation or for display in an application other than Adobe Acrobat. For information about the
methods included in the Search extended API, see the
Acrobat and PDF Library API Reference
.
Catalog extended API
Acrobat Catalog is a plug-in that allows you to create a full-text index of a set of PDF documents. A full-text
index is a searchable database of all the text in the documents. After building an index, you can use the
Search command to search the entire library quickly. Searches of full-text indexes created using Catalog
are faster and more convenient than using the Find command.
The Catalog plug-in has an HFT consisting of several methods that plug-in developers can import and use.
In addition, Catalog supports DDE, and broadcasts several Windows messages. For information about the
methods included in the Catalog extended API, see the
Acrobat and PDF Library API Reference
.
PDF Consultant and Accessibility Checker extended API
Acrobat comes with a plug-in called the PDF Consultant and Accessibility Checker. This plug-in walks
through PDF documents, visiting each object and determining its type and other statistics. It can make
certain modifications or repairs to the PDF document. The objects that the consultant visits can range
from simple, primitive types such as Cos strings to higher-level objects such as images. Users invoke the
consultant to operate on a particular PDF document, choose which tests or repairs to run, then view the
results and select repair options.
The consultant visits the objects in a PDF document according to instructional flags you pass to it. After
the consultant visits an object, the object may be different. The consultant reclassifies modified objects
before moving on to the next object.