Searching in JDE PDFs (warning: rant)

timallen

timallen

Well Known Member
Has anyone figured out a reasonable way to search for text in a J.D. Edwards installation document? Due to the %&/"@!! encrypted font they use in their PDFs, you can't just type in "Click Advanced TAM" as a search criteria. You can, of course, find the phrase manually the first time, copy it out, and paste the resulting gobbledy-gook into the search box. But that's not very convenient.

I started cobbling together a little C program that would do the necessary replacements in the document (#1 is SPACE, 2 is J, 3 is ., 4 is D, 5 is E, 6 is d... though the sequence becomes non-obvious after the first 10 characters or so) but pretty quickly got fed up with it, since the *entire* document is not encrypted-- headers, table of contents (which actually would be useful if it *were* encrypted because it would facilitate the search trick), and courier text are not encrypted.

What were JDE thinking when they encrypted these documents? If an unscrupulous person wanted to give this document to an unauthorized person, they could simply pass them the entire PDF file. I suppose if you were trying to pass off the doument as yours in a training course that you're giving, it would keep you from just stealing the text from JDE. But still, that doesn't take away from the inconvenience and frustration that you get from opening a JDE PDF and trying to search for "Map your Enterprise Server" only to get no results.

Thanks in advance.
 
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