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Colleagues,
The improved search function in Acrobat 6 and Reader 6 have prompted me to look again at indexing my collection of PDFs. I think that I understand the usefulness of updating indexes (Build) and building new indexes (Rebuild). I understand what Purge does but cannot imagine under what conditions one would use it. Is Rebuild not equivalent to Purge followed by Build?
Jo Baer suggested (off list) quoting the guide to Acrobat 5: The short answer is no, Rebuild is not equal to Purge --> Build. Here is what the Acrobat 5 guide has to say:
<quote> Purging and rebuilding indexes
When you rebuild an index, entries for deleted documents and for the
original versions of changed documents remain in the index but are marked as invalid. This incremental updating slightly increases the time required for searches that use the index. ... Because these increases accumulate over time, you should occasionally purge the index before rebuilding it.You should also purge and rebuild if you change the optional search features supported by an index or change the stopwords list used to build an index. Otherwise, search performance may be slowed or search results distorted.
</quote>
But, the guide for Acrobat 6 says:
<quote>
Updating, rebuilding, and purging existing indexes
When you build a new index, the results are a new .pdx file and a new folder that contains one or more .idx files. The .pdx file, which is small, makes the information in the .idx files available to the search function. The .idx files contain the index entries that a user finds in the index, so their file sizes-individually or collectively-can be large. All of these files must be available to users who want to search the index.
You can update, rebuild, or purge an existing index. The differences among updating, rebuilding, and purging are in what happens to the .idx files:
. The Build option updates the existing index instead of replacing it. The process creates an additional .idx file with the updated index information that modifies any earlier .idx files. When you update an existing index, the original entries for deleted and changed documents remain in the index but are marked as invalid. Updating is usually quicker than rebuilding a new index, especially if you have a large set of documents to index and the changes are few. However, if the number of changes is large or becomes large over repeated updatings, this can significantly add to the time required to search the index, making it inefficient for your users.
. The Rebuild option creates a new index instead of merely updating the existing one. This process also overwrites the existing .idx file folder, replacing all older .idx files with the new .idx file.
. The Purge option deletes the contents of the existing .idx file folder (the .idx files), but does not delete the .pdx file.
</quote>
It would appear that either the function or the terminology has changed in Acrobat 6. A6's 'Build' seems to be A5's 'Rebuild'; A6's 'Rebuild' seems to be A5's 'purge and rebuild'; A6's 'Purge' seems to be the same but now redundant or almost so, unless the .pdx file can be used without the .idx files, which seems not to be true.
I would be grateful for clarification from those experienced with the use of catalog.
Thanks, LTM
Lindsey Thomas Martin Crych Digital Publishing [EMAIL PROTECTED] office 604.215.9490 mobile 604.833.9490
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