How to search for text in a PDF

Find every occurrence of a word or phrase across the whole document, jump from match to match, and highlight or redact all of them in one step.

Do it now in the free PDF editorOpens in your browser. No sign-up, no watermark — your PDF is never uploaded.

Open the PDF editor

Search a PDF in four steps

Open the PDF editor and choose your PDF.
Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on a Mac) or click Find in the toolbar, and type what you are looking for.
Press Enter for the next match and Shift+Enter for the previous one. The counter shows where you are, for example “2 of 5”.
Click Highlight all to mark every match, or Redact all to remove them. Press Esc to close the search.

Searching in the editor

The search bar opens above the pages and the match counter updates as you type. The current match is outlined in blue and scrolled into view; the other matches are marked in amber. Because the editor searches the text stored in the PDF, results are exact — the search does not depend on what happens to be visible on screen.

Turn search results into highlights

Reviewing a long contract for a party’s name or a keyword? Search for it and click Highlight all. A highlight is added over every match in the whole document, in the current highlight color. Each highlight is a normal item you can recolor, move or delete, and Ctrl+Z removes them all in one step.

Turn search results into redactions

The same works for confidential data: Redact all places a redaction box over every match. When you download, those pages are saved with the text removed. Read the guide to redacting a PDF for what this means for the file.

Good to know

The search finds text inside words as well: “port” also matches “report”. Add a space to search for whole words.
Text you added yourself with the Text tool is not part of the original PDF and is not searched.
Pages you rotated, moved or inserted are searched in their new order.

Frequently asked questions

Is the search case-sensitive?

No. Upper and lower case are treated the same, and accents are ignored too, so “resume” also finds “Résumé” and “sasa” finds “Šaša”.

Why does my search find nothing in a scanned PDF?

A scanned PDF is a picture of the pages and contains no text to search. Run it through OCR software first to add a text layer.

Does it search all pages?

Yes, every page of the document, starting from the page you are looking at.

Can I search for a phrase across a line break?

Yes. Line breaks and extra spaces count as a single space, so a phrase that wraps onto the next line is still found.

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