How do I do a Text search on a whole load of PDF's ?

MouldyOldDough

I have several hundred PDF's (Medical records) including handwriting - what is the best way to search the whole lot for a specific word or phrase ?

Please don't say "work your way through them all, manually"

Glad

I've just asked my techy other half and he says

'If they're proper PDFs with searchable text, Adobe Acrobat can search across multiple PDFs in a folder.

If they're scanned images (which many medical records are), you'll need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) first. Some OCR software is surprisingly good, even with handwriting, although handwritten notes are still hit and miss.

If I had several hundred PDFs to search, I'd probably use something like Adobe Acrobat Pro or ABBYY FineReader to OCR the lot first, then search them all in one go.@

I would add though I'm not sure how good any software would be with some doctors' handwriting!

Emmia

I use the full version of Adobe, and to be honest if the files have been made text searchable via OCR you still won't be able to search multiple files simultaneously for the information you want - you'd need to search each file individually for the key words.

Vitor

Recognize text in scanned PDFs with Acrobat | Adobe Acrobat

Woodstok2000

This is where AI can do great job. I did something similar recently with copilot, worked perfectly.

MouldyOldDough

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82074387#Comment_82074387

Thanks good idea !!

jim1999

You might need a more specialised tool for those kinds of numbers. Give notebooklm a whirl, you can upload a lot of documents to that and ask questions about the whole batch.

sausage_time

⚠️ Before exposing to any 3rd party, is patient confidentiality a concern?

alanclarke

Try grepwin - https://grepwin.com/ or dngrep - https://dngrep.github.io/

Flugelhorn

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82074548#Comment_82074548

this is a good point - need to go through them with a human eye to check first ;)

having said that, presume they are the OPs own notes and someone will already have gone through them to remove 3rd party references

PHK

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82074733#Comment_82074733

Referring to the OP's previous threads, they are their own notes which they wished to store in a particular fashion. (Folders and sub-folders by date ) During that thread it was pointed out to them that what they were intending to do would make it very difficult to find information.