Comment by highl
10 years ago
~4 months ago announced http://pdf-highlighter.com/
It's a server side solution for highlighting search terms in PDF documents. Can show highlights in a web based PDF viewer (customization of PDF.js) or burn them to PDF. Supports navigation between hits. So far, most customers used it with search solutions based on Solr and dtSearch but it could be easily integrated with any search engine.
Didn't get any comments on HN but it's a profitable project otherwise.
What was the motivation to create this?
End users love it when they can open found PDF document on a page where search terms occur and when they can easily jump between matches. Very useful feature when documents have thousands of pages although some clients use it even with single page document archives.
Earlier versions of Acrobat Reader had support for term highlighting using “PDF Highlight File Format” which is XML-like file specifying word offsets in page. There are search solutions that relied on this feature but Adobe deprecated it with Acrobat Reader X.
Anyway, my solution re-enables search term highlighting in PDF and does not require any special viewer – web based viewer [1] works on both desktop and mobile web browsers. It's easy to integrate with existing search solutions and can use either Adobe's PDF highlights file as input or highlight for a search query.
[1] http://pdf-highlighter.com/docs/Highlighting_PDF_Viewer.html