Home / PDF Tools / Search in PDFs
Search in PDFs
Full-text search across many PDFs at once, with context and the match highlighted on the page.
Free, no uploads, no sign-up. Runs 100% in your browser.
How Search in PDFs works
PDF.js extracts the text of every page of every file into memory. Searches run instantly on that text, with optional case, whole-word and regular expression matching.
Input: PDF.
How to use Search in PDFs
- Drop your PDF onto the Search in PDFs area, or click to choose it.
- Wait a moment while page thumbnails render locally.
- Choose the pages and options you need. Previews update as you go.
- Press the main action button and download the finished PDF.
Tips
- Encrypted PDFs must be unlocked first with Unlock PDF.
- Large scanned PDFs are mostly images. Compress PDF shrinks them the most.
- Your original file is never modified; you always download a new copy.
Search in PDFs FAQ
- Are my files uploaded?
- No. This tool runs entirely in your browser tab. Files are read from your disk into memory and the result is generated locally.
- Is it free? Are there limits or watermarks?
- Free and open source (MIT). There are no file-size caps, daily quotas, accounts or watermarks.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, once the page (and any engine it needs) has loaded, it keeps working without a connection thanks to the service worker cache.
Related tools
- PDF Reader: Fast viewer with search, zoom, thumbnails and outline.
- PDF to Text: Extract text from every page, with layout-aware ordering.
- OCR PDF: Recognise text in scanned PDFs and images in 10+ languages.
- Merge PDF: Combine multiple PDFs into one ordered document with drag-and-drop sorting.