Will two PDF/a merged documents continue to be searchable

[chrisp76384864]

Hi everyone and thank you for any help.

If I merge two PDF/a documents the final document is not searchable.  Is this intended behavior?  Both documents are searchable before being merged.  We are using Adobe Acrobat XI (ver. 11.0.09) on a Windows 10 notebook.  My online search efforts unfortunately did not produce anything usable.  Thanks again for any input.

[Bernd Alheit]

How did you merge the documents?

[chrisp76384864]

Tools > Pages > Combine Files into PDF

[Bernd Alheit]

Can you share the documents?

[chrisp76384864]

Unfortunately I am unable to as the documents are work related.  Do you think it will help if I change all the wording in the document and then share that?  I would keep the format, fonts, etc.  Or would this possibly change the outcome?  This might take a little bit of extra time as the documents have multiple pages.  I can start working on this now and test to see if I get the same results then I can share.  Thank you.

[Test Screen Name]

My guess is that the option to make a "portfolio" was switched on. Make sure you turn this off. Note that the combined result will not be PDF/A !

[Test Screen Name]

Did you check on what I said in my reply?

[chrisp76384864]

Yes, I did verify that it was not set to portfolio.  When I converted the document back to PDF/A it again was no longer searchable.

[Test Screen Name]

That's interesting and surprising. I can't account for it.

[chrisp76384864]

Hello,

My apologies for re-birthing this issue.  But we have been making changes in our department and have recently been moved to Lenovo X1 Yogas using Windows 10.

Unfortunately the issue of two PDF/a documents being merged still end up as unsearchable even though the documents before the merge were PDF/a and searchable.  I am allowed to provide documents this time if that can be helpful but my continued search has not produced any fixes. Thanks for any help.  Additionally we are using Adobe Acrobat Pro XI ver 11.0.22 now.

Regards,

[Tariq Dar · Accepted solution]

Hi Chrisp,

I failed to understand why are you merging two PDF/a documents? Ideally, we shouldn't be doing that PDF/a format mean archived documents. If the document is saved already with that feature you will are losing it.  It is better to use PortFolio feature to combine those together.

How can you best make PDF/A files text searchable?

If a PDF/A file is created from a digital text document, the text will automatically be recognized. Normally you don't have to worry about a PDF/A file being text searchable unless the file was created from a scanned paper document or image. But even then, OCR can be used to make it searchable. In this case, however, only PDF/A-1b is possible and not the more stringent PDF/A-1a.

Since PDF/A-1a lays especially high requirements on the fonts used and on the file structure, this level of conformance is recommended over PDF/A-1b for an exact text searchability, text extraction, and for the reuse of content. PDF/A-1b supports text search, may however not find all instances of a text if there are anomalies with character coding.

-Tariq Dar

[Ryan28968287ryu2]

Under options there is a file size option for the new file.  The largest file size corrects this issue.