Question for PDF experts

[rjg001]

Picked up my first Ipad yesterday - current gen 64 GB wifi - and love it. But do have a question.

I handle some large pdfs that are not OCR and frequently cannot be made OCR (i.e. medical records with lots of handwriting and strange formatting). One of the main reasons for getting an Ipad was to review and annotate pdfs. I've started with GoodReader which I like a lot, but have one issue:

I need the notes I add to be searchable. Preferably this can be done with pop-up or sticky notes as opposed to actually adding text to the documents, which I don't really want to do. I haven't found a way to search the text of my notes in GoodReader.

Can this be done in GoodReader or another app?

 

[jlc1978]

Picked up my first Ipad yesterday - current gen 64 GB wifi - and love it. But do have a question.

I handle some large pdfs that are not OCR and frequently cannot be made OCR (i.e. medical records with lots of handwriting and strange formatting). One of the main reasons for getting an Ipad was to review and annotate pdfs. I've started with GoodReader which I like a lot, but have one issue:

I need the notes I add to be searchable. Preferably this can be done with pop-up or sticky notes as opposed to actually adding text to the documents, which I don't really want to do. I haven't found a way to search the text of my notes in GoodReader.

Can this be done in GoodReader or another app?

Remarks or PDFexpert from readdle (readdle.com) appears to do that. I use Remarks but have not tried that; one bonus is it uses PDF as it's default file format.

 

[jojoba]

Check out iAnnotate. I don't know if it does exactly what you are asking for, but I think so - it's by far one of the most fully featured PDF annotation apps on the market.

 

[wadjj]

Check out iAnnotate. I don't know if it does exactly what you are asking for, but I think so - it's by far one of the most fully featured PDF annotation apps on the market.

Not necessarily the most fully featured, goodreader seems to do more, but it's the only one capable of full library full text search, which is really useful.

 

[sk1wbw]

PDF Pen, maybe? A bit pricey, but I think it can do this.

 

[epicmar]

I just tried it with iAnnotate and it does not appear to search text annotation across files; however, it will search text annotation within the currently selected file.

 

[Grey Hound]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing!

 

[epicmar]

Picked up my first Ipad yesterday - current gen 64 GB wifi - and love it. But do have a question.

I handle some large pdfs that are not OCR and frequently cannot be made OCR (i.e. medical records with lots of handwriting and strange formatting). One of the main reasons for getting an Ipad was to review and annotate pdfs. I've started with GoodReader which I like a lot, but have one issue:

I need the notes I add to be searchable. Preferably this can be done with pop-up or sticky notes as opposed to actually adding text to the documents, which I don't really want to do. I haven't found a way to search the text of my notes in GoodReader.

Can this be done in GoodReader or another app?

I just tried what you asked in Notability and I think it does what you want. I can add a test box anywhere on a PDF and then search on the annotation text and it is included in the search results. Not only does it include this when you are searching the open file, but it also can search across multiple files.

 

[jojoba]

Not necessarily the most fully featured, goodreader seems to do more, but it's the only one capable of full library full text search, which is really useful.

Some of the things that iAnnotate does for me which I use all the time are vertical scrolling, set mark and return to mark. I haven't found that in GR yet but perhaps I haven't looked properly.

 

[rjg001]

I forgot all about this thread but thought I would update it.

I was able to confirm that PDF Expert does it, so I bought that one. It does just what I want it to. PDFPen will do it as well according to an email exchange with them.

I couldn't find this function in GoodReader at all. I contacted them through Facebook to see if I was missing anything and it evidently wasn't worth their time to respond.

 

[J Powers]

I had the same issue; after trial and error I found the app WritePDF does the full search perfectly - and very quickly highlighting the result in red. This is key for me as I tend to do a lot of markups over large reports.

 

[epicmar]

I had the same issue; after trial and error I found the app WritePDF does the full search perfectly - and very quickly highlighting the result in red. This is key for me as I tend to do a lot of markups over large reports.

I purchased WritePDF, but found that its handwriting annotation was so much weaker than GoodReader and iAnnotate. I really want to find WritePDF adequate because they have some really innovative features; and I really, really don't like what Branchfire did to iAnnotate in the latest update. I also could not get the search across files to work in WritePDF, although it works fine for searching in the open file.

I am thinking of giving PDF Expert a try. Does it support searching the content of files across all or a select group of files?