Adobe Acrobat Action to Highlight Multiple Words or Phrases in Multiple PDFs

Last night's post provided instructions on how to automatically collect quotes from an outline or brief. This night's post provides a solution for how to highlight those quotes in PDFs of the cited source documents.

This pdf: https://acrobatusers.com/assets/uploads/actions/Find_and_Highlight_Words_and_Phrases.pdf contains detailed instructions on how to install a .sequ file, or Adobe action that will automate the highlighting of terms that you select.

The actual script file, Find and HiLite Words or Phrases.sequ, is embedded in the PDF instructions file. Look in the attachments which are accessed by clicking on the paper clip icon on the left side bar with the thumbnails and the bookmarks. You might want to try an alternate .sequ file I have posted here: http://soshea0.wix.com/litsupporttips#!acrobat-sequ-file-for-highlighting/uuc5t

You just need to double-click on the .sequ file to import it into Acrobat. Once it's imported, in Acrobat XI at least, go to Tools . . .Action Wizard . . . and Select Manage Actions. Then select the action and click on Edit. (See Fig. 1)

Click on 'Search and Remove Text' , uncheck 'Prompt User', and then click on specify settings. You can add strings to search for one by one, or import them from a text file. (See fig. 2).

In Step 2 make sure that the resulting files keep the original names (backup your originals just in case) and pick Adobe PDF as the output format. (See fig. 3)

Next I recommend that you delete Step 3 in the action. There's not much use for separate PDFs tracking what was highlighted, although I suppose they could be used to QC what you did. Anyway just select Step 3 and then click on the garbage can icon.

Press save, and then go back to the Action Wizard and run 'Find, Highlight and Extract'. You'll see an option to load multiple PDF files. (See fig. 4)

Click start and the PDFs should get highlighted without any prompting from Acrobat. (See fig. 5).