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Dick Margulis wrote in response to the concordance indexing question:
>Instead of producing the hardcopy index pages to be included in the
>bound manuals, you could publish the manuals as PDF files on a CD and
>use Adobe Acrobat Catalog to create a full-text database.
>
>Consider: You can get a bulk price from Adobe on Acrobat Reader CD's
>(cheap!) that you can distribute with your own CD. (Check with Adobe.
>You might also be able to get a license to include the reader software
>directly _on_ your CD.) The Search plug-in for the reader enables the
>user to search for words, phrases, etc. You can also include bookmarks
>that get the user to the desired page range.
>
>And all of this is short-learning-curve stuff. There are a few tricks
>you need to know in order to put the index database on the CD so it can
>be searched.
A couple things to add. When you make your Catalog index, you can exclude
words (Acrobat calls them "stop" words, I think). By all means, put the
Reader on your CD. Adobe *wants* you to do this. And third, make sure you
keep the same relative path between your PDFs and your PDX (the Catalog
index file extension). The easiest way to do this is to just keep them all
in the same directory. Oh, and make sure everything works before you burn
the CD, and then test the CD on several machines before...yeah, yeah, you
know that