Search in PDF

Find words and which page they appear on

No database: AIMRAN doesn't store your files, text or results

What is Search in PDF?

In a document hundreds of pages long, finding every time a name, a clause or a term appears can take ages. With this tool you type what you are looking for and instantly see which pages it is on.

Each result shows the snippet of text where it appears and, when you click it, you see the page with the match highlighted. You can search without worrying about accents or capital letters, or match whole words only.

How to use it

  1. Drag in the PDF.
  2. Type the word or phrase you are looking for.
  3. Turn on “Ignore accents and case” or “Whole word” as needed.
  4. Review the matches grouped by page.
  5. Click a result to see the page with the word highlighted.

Advantages

Technical details

The text of each page is extracted with pdf.js, keeping the position of every fragment. The search normalizes character by character (removing diacritics and lowercasing if chosen) while keeping the mapping to the original text, which makes it possible to show the exact context and calculate the highlight boxes on the rendered page, approximating the width per character. The whole-word option requires word boundaries on both sides. Up to 2000 matches are returned. Scanned PDFs contain no text and must go through OCR first. Accepts PDFs up to 200 MB.

Frequently asked questions

How do I search for a word in a PDF?

Drag in the PDF and type the word in the search box. You will see every match grouped by page.

Can I search without taking accents into account?

Yes. With “Ignore accents and case” turned on, searching for “resume” will also find “Résumé”.

Why doesn't it find anything in my PDF?

It is probably a scanned PDF with no text. Run it through the OCR tool first and search again.

How do I count how many times a word appears in a PDF?

Type it in the search box: the “Matches” section shows the total and how many pages it appears on.

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