You run searches to find specific items in PDFs. You can run a simple search, looking for a search term within in a single file, or you can run a more complex search, looking for various kinds of data in one or more PDFs.

You can run a search using either the Search window or the Find toolbar. In either case, Reader searches the PDF body text, layers, form fields, and digital signatures. You can also include bookmarks and comments in the search.

The Search window offers more options and more kinds of searches than the Find toolbar. When you use the Search window, object data and image XIF (extended image file format) metadata are also searched. For searches across multiple PDFs, Reader also looks at document properties and XMP metadata, and it searches indexed structure tags when searching a PDF index. If some of the PDFs you search have attached PDFs, you can include the attachments in the search.