PdfPageLookup

A lookup table can make it much easier to find words in a document, but you normally need to rely on a separate utility to generate it, as not a lot of text editors come equipped with this feature.

PdfPageLookup is an open-source program that can prove very helpful in this scenario, as it can process any PDF file and create a lookup table in seconds. It doesn’t need to be installed and lacks a standard GUI.

Once you have downloaded the application, you only need to unpack the archive and run the executable file. You will be asked to navigate to the document you wish to process, and the program will begin processing it as soon as it is selected.

The operation’s progress is not displayed, as the utility does not come with a GUI, but most PDF files should be processed fairly quickly. A confirmation message is displayed when the task is completed.

PdfPageLookup does the job well enough, as it was able to process even very large documents in not too much time. The noisewords.txt file in the root folder contains words that will be removed from the generated list, and it can be edited freely.

Unfortunately, we noticed that the lookup table was not formatted correctly when it was pasted in text editors such as WordPad and Microsoft Word. Because of this, the list is fairly difficult to read, so this issue needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

In short, PdfPageLookup is a simple, open-source tool that enables you to generate word lists for your documents with very little effort. It is remarkably straightforward, even lacking a GUI, but the created lookup tables were not formatted correctly during our tests.