Thomson Reuters has introduced a searchable PDF option for patent documents and file histories. Searchable PDFs are available at a slightly higher price than standard PDFs. They give you the ability to search for the occurrence of terms within a document using the Adobe “Find” or “Search” function. For example, you might want to locate names or technical terms within a document.

Please note, text searching works best with non-accented roman characters and standard English alphabet characters. So, for example, English and Italian pose fewer difficulties than French and German. Users may find that certain words which use special characters, for example daß in German, need to be searched for carefully. In this example, daß may be represented as da8, da13, daI3 and dal3 when searching. Alternatively you may truncate the term to omit the special characters (e.g. da) or browse the text for the word and then use Adobe’s “Text Selection” option to copy the term from the text and paste it into the Adobe “Find” or “Search” input box. Sometimes the accents associated with characters (e.g. “ ö “) may be ignored and so the character will be searched without an accent (e.g. as “ o “). Searchable text is not available with non-roman script (kanji) or manuscript.