How to search a PDF on a Mac

With PDF Unlimited (free)

1. Open the PDF

   Open the document in PDF Unlimited. Any mode works, but Read mode keeps the page uncluttered.

2. Start a search

   Press ⌘F, or choose Edit > Find > Find…, and type the word or phrase you are looking for.

3. Jump between matches

   Press ⌘G for the next match and ⇧⌘G for the previous one. Each match is highlighted on the page.

4. See every result at once

   Choose View > Search Results (⌥⌘4) to list all matches in the sidebar. Click any result to jump straight to that page.

5. Search for what you selected

   Spotted a name on the page and want every other mention? Select it and press ⌘E (Edit > Find > Use Selection for Find), then ⌘G.

With Preview, built into macOS

1. Use the search field

   Open the PDF in Preview and type a word or phrase in the search field in the toolbar. If you cannot see the field, make the window wider.

2. Choose exact or any match

   Preview searches for the exact phrase. To match any of the words instead, click the magnifying glass and choose Any Match.

3. Move through the results

   Use the Next and Previous buttons. Click Search Rank to sort by number of matches, or Page Order to sort by page.

4. Clear it

   When you are done, click the Delete button in the search field.

When search finds nothing

If you can see the word on the page but search insists it is not there, the page is almost certainly a picture of text. Scanners and phone cameras produce PDFs like this. There are no letters for the search to find, only pixels arranged to look like letters.

The quick test: try to select a single word. If your cursor drags a box over the page instead of highlighting text, the PDF needs OCR. In PDF Unlimited, choose Tools > Make Searchable (OCR), wait a moment while it reads each page, and search again. It all happens on your Mac. Our guide to making a PDF searchable explains the details.

Other reasons a search comes up empty

A few less obvious culprits:

• A typo or a different spelling in the document, like "organisation" versus "organization". Try a shorter fragment of the word.
• Hyphenation at the end of a line. A word split across two lines may not match as one word.
• The text is inside an image, such as a logo, a chart or a pasted screenshot, even on a page that otherwise has real text.
• The PDF is locked. A password-protected PDF has to be opened with its password before anything inside can be searched. See remove a password from a PDF.

Searching is the first step of bigger jobs

Search is how you find every mention of a name before you redact it, every clause to highlight before a meeting, or the one page you need to split into its own file. The Search Results list is handy here, because it shows how many places you need to visit.

Need the words out of the PDF entirely? Convert the PDF to text and search it in any text editor you like.

Getting around a long document

Search is not the only way to move through a 300-page manual. View > Table of Contents (⌥⌘3) shows the document outline in the sidebar, if the PDF has one, and Go > Go to Page… (⌥⌘G) jumps straight to a page number. Thumbnails (⌥⌘2) are best when you remember roughly what a page looks like but not what it says.

Questions