Often it is several months before a recently published Groundwater Project PDF book is made available as webbook. In the meantime, readers may want to simultaneously search a number of PDFs for a specific term.
This can be accomplished by following these steps:
First all the GW-Project PDFs you want to search must be downloaded and saved in one folder on your computer.
Then open one of the PDFs in Adobe Acrobat and select Edit on the top menu, then go down to Advanced Search.
This opens a pane where you can select the radio button for All PDF Documents in, where you can browse for the folder where the GW-Project PDFs are stored. Once that folder is specified, type in the search word/phrase in the search box and add check to the boxes below the term to limit the search if needed, then click on the search button.
This will display a list of all the PDFs containing that term/phrase. In this example case, when searching for confined aquifers in the GWP books, the term was found in 21 of the PDFs and occurred a total of 580 times.
The list of occurences within any particular book can be displayed by clicking the plus sign to the left of the PDF title. In the image shown below, the plus sign to the left of the title Groundwater in Our Water Cycle was selected and all locations where the term occurs in the book are displayed. The first few occurrences of the term are shown in the window and the user can scroll down to find the rest. Occurrences of ‘unconfined aquifer’ are also listed because that term includes the search term (confined aquifers). This could have been eliminated by checking the box for ‘Whole words only.’
Selecting any one of those options displays that PDF page. In this case, the fourth item was selected and I was taken to the following location in the book.
This approach facilitates use of the Groudnwater Project PDFs. Readers are encouraged to check the project Books page from time to time to see if a webbook has been completed for a given book. A description of how to search all of the webbooks for a specific term/phrase is provided by this blog.
