Website FAQ

You can use the Adobe Reader search tool to find particular words or phrases in any of the PDF documents on this website.

1. Open the PDF file.

2. Go to the document landing page and click on the button to download the document.

3. Save the document on your computer.

4. Open the PDF file using Adobe Reader.

5. Click on ‘Ctrl’ and then ‘F’ (or ‘Edit’ and ‘Find’). A small pop-up search box will appear.

6. Type in the word or phrase you are looking for.

7. Press ‘Return’.

8. Providing Adobe Reader can find the word or phrase in the document, you will be taken to the first location where it occurs in the PDF. Click on the ‘Next’ button (a small arrow pointing to the right) to take you to the next place it occurs.

If you wish to conduct an advanced search of the document:

1. Click on the tiny down arrow on the right-hand side of the search box.

2. Select ‘Open Full Reader Search’. The full search screen will appear.

3. Apply additional criteria or click on ‘Show More Options’ and then apply more criteria, as required.

In some circumstances Adobe Reader may not find the words in the document, even though they are there. Both Adobe Reader and the website search and browse facilities use optical character recognition (OCR) software to ‘read’ the scanned document images and convert them to searchable text. However, the OCR software provided by our scanning service partners will not necessarily give identical results to the built-in OCR used for searching within Adobe Reader.

For example, a common problem with OCR of typewritten documents is for spaces between letters to be interpreted as spaces between words: l i k e  t h i s.