dtSearch has announced a version 2026.01 beta that simplifies how users see highlighted search results in PDF files. The new release eliminates the need for a separate PDF highlighter plug-in, a change that applies to dtSearch enterprise and developer products, including SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS. These products search terabytes of mixed online and offline data instantly, running on premises or in the cloud, such as on Azure or AWS.
The main feature of the new version is improved PDF hit highlighting. The new process highlights search hits by adding annotations directly to the PDF file. This means PDF files now work like other supported data types—such as Microsoft Office files and emails with attachments—displaying files with multicolor hit highlighting for any number of concurrent users.
dtSearch owner David Thede told SD Times in an interview that the old approach of using an Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in became increasingly untenable in a browser environment. The new method provides a much cleaner way for people to add PDF highlighting in their applications. Thede explained how the system changed: “The key to getting that work is that we needed to be able to add the highlights as annotations in the pdf file, so rather than generating html from pdf, we take an existing pdf and we stick the annotations on it, and then serve that.”
In the new version, dtSearch has a way to work with browsers that use the open-source pdf.js project, Thede said. The Firefox browser, like many browsers, have JavaScript-based PDF viewers based on that project. “So, in our dtSearch desktop product we can embed a viewer window that has pdf.js used to display the pdf file. We can do the hit navigation and the hit highlighting on top of that, but we can also do it in our web-based products.”
dtSearch products include a Terabyte Indexer that can index a terabyte of text across many sources, including emails with nested attachments and online data. Indexed search is typically instantaneous, even when covering terabytes of data with concurrent users. The product line offers over 25 search features, including full-text and metadata options. It supports Unicode for hundreds of international languages and offers forensics-oriented options. SDKs are available for C++, Java, and .NET APIs, and they support databases like SQL and NoSQL.
Thede stressed the value of the new PDF feature. He said, “Being able to highlight hits in PDF files after a search is a very nice thing to be able to do, because PDF is so widely used”. He noted that this is a huge time saver for professionals, such as lawyers reviewing long documents1
Regarding AI integration, Thede confirmed that dtSearch does not include AI in its products. He noted this decision is tied to customer security concerns: “Our customers are generally institutions that are extremely concerned about confidentiality”. However, Thede added that dtSearch plans to look at ways to give users the tools to connect their search results with AI when they choose to do so.