Many document files in different formats can be downloaded from websites which can be selected for their specific content using search items as a Verity Search Engine and Web Server. After downloading into a user-workstation, a topic search would not be ordinarily feasible to search files of different formats. The present system and method enables topic searching by converting the different file formats into a common format such as PDF which then can easily be topic-searched by a browser such as an Adobe Acrobat program.