Search Inside a PDF
Search for words or phrases inside a PDF and jump between matches with page numbers. Runs locally in your browser.
How it works
- Add a PDF. Its text is extracted once, in your browser.
- Type a search term to see every match with its page number and surrounding text.
- Step through matches, or refine with case-sensitive, whole-word or regular-expression matching.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from my PDF reader’s search?
It gives you every match at once, with page numbers, match counts per page and a snippet of surrounding text, so you can see the whole picture instead of stepping through hits one at a time.
Can I search for whole words only?
Yes. Whole-word matching uses word boundaries, so searching for "cat" will not match "catalog". Note that word boundaries are defined for Latin letters and digits, so for other scripts the search behaves as a substring match.
Does it support regular expressions?
Yes, optionally. Regular expressions are evaluated with the browser’s own RegExp engine — no code is executed and nothing is sent anywhere. An invalid pattern is reported as an error rather than silently matching nothing.
Why can I not find text that I can see on the page?
If the page is a scanned image there is no text layer to search. This tool shares its extraction engine with the PDF to Text tool, so if that tool shows an empty page, search cannot find anything on it either.