How to search for text inside a PDF
Find every occurrence of a phrase, see which pages it is on, and get a highlighted copy.
Searching a document you have open is easy. Searching one to produce a record — which pages mention this clause, how many times does this term appear, is this name anywhere in here — is a different task, and it is what this tool is for.
You get the count, the page references, and optionally a copy of the document with every match highlighted for someone else to review.
The steps
- Upload the document.
- Type the word or phrase to find.
- Choose whether capitalisation must match, and whether you want a highlighted copy.
- Run the tool to see matches grouped by page.
Searching before redacting
This is the natural first step whenever something sensitive has to come out of a document. Search for the term, see every page it lands on, confirm you have found all the variants, and only then redact. Going straight to redaction risks removing three occurrences out of five.
The highlighted copy
Highlighting adds annotations over the matches and writes a new file; the underlying text is not altered and your upload is untouched. It is useful when you need to hand the document to someone else and point at the relevant passages without writing a list of page numbers.
Scanned pages will not match
Search needs real text. A scan is an image of text, so there is nothing to match against until the document has been through OCR. A simple test: open the PDF in any reader and try to select a line with your cursor. If you cannot, neither can the search.
