About find text in PDF
Search the reconstructed text layer for a literal word or phrase. Spaces, tabs and line breaks are normalized for matching within each page; matches never cross page boundaries, and line-end hyphens are not removed. Exact totals include overlapping occurrences. The preview and download show the first 500 hits with original page numbers and up to 200 characters of original extracted context per hit, plus counts for the first 500 selected pages. A warning states when later contexts or page rows are omitted. Source offsets refer to the unmodified reconstructed text, not positions in the PDF. Whole-word matching treats Unicode letters, combining marks, numbers and connectors such as underscores as word characters; it is not language-specific word segmentation. Case-insensitive search uses Unicode case matching, while Match case requires the same casing. Nothing is uploaded and no highlights are written into the PDF.
How to find text in PDF
- 01
Add the PDF
Drop in the document you need to search.
- 02
Type your query
Enter a word or a full phrase. Phrases are matched even when they wrap across a line.
- 03
Tighten the match
Enable Match case for defined terms, or Whole words only to stop short queries matching inside longer words.
- 04
Review the hit list
Each result shows its page number and surrounding context. Note the pages, then jump to them in your reader.
What this tool does
- Exact total counts, with the first 500 occurrences shown alongside original page numbers
- Phrase matching across whitespace and line breaks within a page; hyphens stay literal
- Unicode-aware whole-word boundaries
- Case-sensitive mode for capitalised defined terms
- Hit counts for up to 500 selected pages, with explicit truncation notices
Limitations worth knowing
Every PDF tool has constraints. Stating them plainly is more useful than discovering them halfway through your work.
- Only searches the text layer — a scanned PDF returns nothing until it is OCR'd.
- No regular expressions or wildcards; queries are literal words and phrases.
- Results give page numbers rather than highlighting the hits inside the PDF itself.
- Text drawn as vector outlines is not searchable because it is not text in the file.
How your file is handled
This tool runs entirely inside this browser tab. When you choose a file, your browser reads it from your own disk and hands the bytes to JavaScript running on this page — no network request carries your document anywhere. You can confirm that yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and run the tool. You will see no upload.
Nothing is stored after the fact. Closing or reloading this tab discards the file, the result and everything derived from them, because none of it ever left your machine. Read how local processing works.
Questions about find text in PDF
Can a phrase span a line break?
Yes. Whitespace is normalized within each page, so a phrase split across reconstructed lines can match. Hyphenated words are not rejoined, and a phrase split across two pages does not match. Reading-order errors in extraction can still prevent a match.
Can I search a scanned document?
Not directly — there is no text to search. Run OCR PDF first to add a text layer, then search the result.
Do you support wildcards or regular expressions?
No. Queries are literal, which keeps results predictable. Extract the text and search it in your editor if you need pattern matching.
Is my search term sent anywhere?
No. Both the document and the query stay in your tab; the search runs in JavaScript against text held in memory.
Tools that pair with this one
- Extract Text from PDFLift the text layer out of a PDF and keep it in reading order.
- PDF Text ExtractorOne-pass extraction when you just need the words, fast.
- OCR PDFTurn a scanned PDF into something you can search — without uploading it.
- PDF Text StatisticsOne report that describes how a document is written, not just how long it is.
- Compare PDF TextOnly the words, so a reformatted document still reads as unchanged.
- PDF Word CounterA real word count for a PDF, with the counting rule stated up front.