Acrobat 8 continues with the search options you had available with Acrobat 7. You’ll notice the Find tool and the Search pane are both present in this release; however, the Search pane has had a little cosmetic change and no longer appears nested in the previous How To pane.

In Acrobat 8, you find the Search pane working as a floating window that opens on the left side of the Document pane. You can find information contained in PDF documents either with the Find tool or the Search window for open documents. The search extends to PDFs scattered around your hard drive and all over the Internet and without the assistance of a search index.

However, creating index files with Acrobat Catalog and searching the resultant index files is available to you for more sophisticated and much faster searches. We'll discuss all the tools and features available in Acrobat viewers for searching through PDF files and creating and searching index files.

The Find toolbar is loaded by default when you open Acrobat. There’s no real need to open the toolbar in the More Tools window if the toolbar is not present in the Toolbar Well. The toolbar automatically opens when you select a menu command or keyboard shortcut to use the Find feature.

The Search window opens from a menu command; therefore, no special tool arrangement is needed when searching PDF documents. For searching PDF documents you may want to load the Search tool. By default the tool is not loaded in the File toolbar. Open a context menu on the Toolbar Well and select More Tools.

In the More Tools window, scroll down the File toolbar and check the box adjacent to the Search tool. Click OK and the Search tool is loaded in the File toolbar. If you intend to engage in editing sessions, comment and review, printing files, and so on. The tool arrangement depends on your editing ambitions.