Logical operators in advanced search

[twiglet]

Am I misunderstanding how the logical operators in Advanced Search should work?

I have a text pdf containing

"It was resolved that a letter be sent"

A search on "letter OR resolved" is successful, as it should be - any search word, any order.

But a search on "letter AND resolved" is not, and neither is "resolved AND letter"

On the other hand, "resolved AND that" does work, and so does "that AND resolved"

The AND operator only seems to work if the searched words are next to each other, in any order. That's not, um, logical, is it?

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello twiglet,

You've got it correct, at this time the AND operator only works if the two words are next to each other.
Proximity search with the "AND" is coming in ver3 of the Viewer.

Best,
Stefan

[twiglet]

Thanks. By 'proximity' search, I take it you mean that all of the words in something like

"apples AND lemons AND pears"

would have to be within a certain distance (word count?) from each other.

Hopefully that distance will be user settable to be infinite, so it would find a match provided all three words appear at some point in the document, regardless of how far apart they are, or in which order. That's the way I would have expected a conventional AND operator to behave.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello twiglet,

Yes you got the meaning of "proximity search" correctly.

I don't have the details yet, but as far as I am aware the default would be all the search terms to be on the same page, and whether or not that will be user definable to extend to "whole document" I can't tell for now, so lets see what ver3 will bring and we can continue the discussion after that.

Best,
Stefan

[twiglet]

To be perfectly honest, fixing the proximity distance strikes me as a crippling disadvantage of such a feature. I can see the circumstances in which a fixed, limited, distance might be useful, but I see far more where searching across the entire document would be far more useful. If google docs can do it, why can't you?

[John - Tracker Supp]

Who said we cannot ?

the answer clearly said - version 3 will offer improvements - but for now the behaviour will not be altered in the near term.

Thanks for your patience.