Adding (searchable) "Index" to Handwritten Pages?

[MikeG2@adobeforums.com]

I have a ~100 page PDF file that was created by scanning handwritten text. I would like to add the ability to search this document for instances of "key" words using Acrobat, Preview, or, ideally, Spotlight. (Basically, I would like to have this seachability take the place of a book's index.)

The handwriting is not sufficiently perfect to allow any form of OCR, but as there will only be a few "key" words per page, I would be willing to type them in manually. Does anyone have any advice about how I should go about doing this?

One possibility would be to just add a footer (or even just plain text) to each page listing all of that page's key words. This has the drawback of being a fairly cumbersome task -- it seems hard to add a different footer to each page -- and making the resulting document look rather ugly.

Ideally, I'd really like to create a document similar to the "searchable image" output from the "import from paper" OCR command but I don't know how to do this manually. It seems like I *should* somehow be able to just
* box off a word on a page (this would actually mean selecting a region of an image, since the each page is stored as an image),
* click a button or something
* type the letters in highlighted "word" (i.e. do the OCR myself)

with the effect that:



* the appearance of the document will not change, BUT
* I can select (and copy, etc.) text by dragging the I-shaped text cursor
over the region I boxed off -- just like I can do for words in a typed document,
and
* if I have Acrobat (or Preview) search the document for occurrences of
this word, the region I just boxed off will show up as a hit, and
* if I do a Spotlight search for this word, this document will show up.

I believe Acrobat does this -- in the case of "searchable image" -- by putting a layer of transparent text on top of the image, with each word properly scaled and positioned so it exactly covers the region of the image it corresponds to. For example, if the handwritten word "foo" appeared in an image on page 6 of the document, then Acrobat would add transparent text containing the letters f-o-o, positioned over the region of the image on page 6 containing the same handwritten letters. Then selecting text by dragging the I-shaped text cursor over the region will have the behavior I described above.

Does anybody either know how I can do this manually or know of any good alternatives? I'm using Acrobat 6 for OS X (but I may upgrade soon, so advice regarding Acrobat 7 might still be useful). Thanks in advance!

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

If you had InDesign, you could place the PDF you've scanned (it's faster in InDesign CS2 because you can place multi-page PDFs). You could add your keywords on each page in white so they were invisible but would still be written into the PDF stream. Then you could export a new PDF.

[Charles L. Martin]

Just user the note field. After you enter your key words, open the properties dialog (^click on note) and change the opacity to 0%. This assumes the note icon bothers you. You can still see the notes by opening the note tab, and can use them to navigate.