Ubuntu – How to index a pdf document

indexingpdf

I am reading a PDF document in Ubuntu 11.04 using the default "Document Viewer". The document is more than 500 pages and it takes a while to complete a "Find …" for a particular text. Is there a way to index the PDF documents on the above mentioned platform? I am looking for a functionality inbuilt into the reader itself.

Best Answer

I'm not sure any of the pdf readers support text indexing - probably because the indexing itself would be rather expensive and pdf files opened and closed 'ad-hoc'

However, I've done some testing and can see that okular - the default viewer from KDE - has much faster search than evince (the default viewer from Ubuntu). I.e. it takes maybe a second for okular to scan the whole 500-page document, while evince spends ~5 sec on the same task.

You can install it by typing

sudo apt-get install okular 

(or just search for it in the Software Center)

if this is the first KDE program on your machine it would require installing quite a bit of dependencies, but it may be well worth it - I'm finding KDE programs generally more capable then their Gnome counterparts... Okular supports pdf annotations, for example, which is also useful sometimes.