Search a PDF for text

Search PDF files the moment they open: press Ctrl+F or click Search, type a word, and step through matches with next and previous. If nothing is found in a scan, run OCR in the same viewer and search again. The file never leaves your browser.

How to find text in a PDF

1. Open the PDF with the drop box above or Open a PDF.
2. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) or click Search in the toolbar.
3. Type the word or phrase. The viewer jumps to the first match.
4. Use next and previous to walk through the other hits.
5. Found what you needed? Mark it with Highlight so it is easy to find next time, then Download.

Search works on the PDF's text layer, which is what every reader uses. It does not need the file to be uploaded or indexed anywhere; pdf.js reads the text in the tab and compares it to what you typed.

Why search finds nothing in a scanned PDF

A scanned PDF is a picture of a page. To a search box it is a photograph, with no letters to match, which is why Ctrl+F in Acrobat, Chrome or Preview comes back empty on scans and faxes. The usual sign: you cannot select any text with the mouse either.

The fix is OCR, optical character recognition, which reads the picture and adds an invisible text layer underneath. The viewer does this in the browser with tesseract.js: click OCR, wait, and the document becomes searchable. Language is picked from your browser's language, English by default. It is slow on long scans, on the order of tens of seconds per page on a laptop, so start it on a short document first. Details and tips are on OCR PDF and in the guide make a scanned PDF searchable.

After OCR, Download writes the text layer into the file, so the same PDF is searchable later in Acrobat, Preview and Windows search as well.

Limits of search in the viewer

• Plain text match. There is no regular-expression search, no whole-word toggle and no search across multiple files at once. For a folder of PDFs, use the operating system's search after the files have a text layer.
• OCR accuracy. Recognized text depends on scan quality. A crisp 300-dpi scan reads well; a skewed phone photo produces misspellings that search will miss. Rotate sideways pages before OCR with rotate PDF.
• Encrypted PDFs. A file that asks for a password to open cannot be loaded, so it cannot be searched here.
• Memory. Hundreds of pages of scans may be slow or run out of memory on a phone; the same file is fine on a laptop.

Search PDF files in other tools

If you want OCR without sending a scan to a server, the browser viewer and ocrmypdf on the command line are the two paths that keep the document local. Learn what the text layer actually is on what is OCR.

Search tips when the word is there but not found

A PDF's text layer is not always laid out the way the page looks, and a few quirks explain most "I can see it but search can't" cases.

• Hyphenation. A word broken across two lines, such as "docu-ment", is stored as two pieces. Search for the longest unbroken part instead.
• Ligatures. Some fonts store "fi" and "fl" as a single character. "office" may not match; try "offic" or a neighboring word.
• Numbers and codes. Invoice numbers like "INV 2026-014" may contain non-breaking spaces or be split by columns. Search for the digits alone.
• Text as outlines. Designers sometimes convert text to curves before exporting; the page is then a drawing with no text layer, like a scan. OCR is the only way to search it.
• Wrong language in OCR. The viewer picks the recognition language from the browser language. A German scan recognized with English settings produces errors; switch the browser language or recognize elsewhere.

When the search does hit, a highlight or a short text note on the spot saves repeating the search next week. Both are saved into the file with Download.

Frequently asked questions