How it works
- 01Open the PDF.
- 02Type a word or phrase, or choose a pattern like email addresses.
- 03Matches are highlighted on the pages and counted per page.
- 04Nothing is changed — the document you export is the one you opened.
Every match, not the next one
Stepping through matches one at a time is fine for reading and useless for checking. Here the panel lists how many matches are on each page, so a glance tells you whether something appears once in an appendix or forty times throughout.
Patterns, not just words
As well as exact text you can search for shapes: email addresses, payment card numbers, national identifiers, phone numbers, IBANs. Card numbers are checked against their checksum so invoice references of the same length are not swept up, and phone numbers are filtered by digit count so years and page numbers are left alone.
It only finds
Search changes nothing. If you want to remove what it finds, that is the Redact tool, which destroys the content rather than covering it and verifies afterwards that it is gone. Keeping the two apart means you can look before you decide.
A search term is text, not a pattern
Typing a name with a full stop in it searches for that name. Search terms are taken literally, so nothing behaves like a wildcard by accident — a detail that matters when the thing you are looking for contains punctuation.
Questions
- Why can it not find anything in my scan?
- A scanned page is a picture of words, so there is no text to search until it has been through OCR. The Extract text tool will tell you plainly when a document is in that state.
- Is it case sensitive?
- No. Searching for a name finds it however it was capitalised.
- How many pages does it search?
- The first two hundred, so a very long document does not lock up the browser while you are still typing.