The text inside PDF documents are not indexed by Windows or by most desktop search programs, so if you need to find a particular PDF doc, you have to manually open each one and perform a search. If you’re simply looking for some text in one PDF, it’s not a problem, but if you need to scan through many PDF documents in a directory, you can.
Without Enhanced Dictation, your spoken words and certain other data are sent to Apple to be converted into text and help your Mac understand what you mean. As a result, your Mac must be connected to the Internet, your words might not convert to text as quickly, and you can speak for no more than 40 seconds at a time (30 seconds in OS X. A search field appears below the ruler bar. Click the “Replace” checkbox to open a Replace text field below the search field. In the Find field, type the word you want to find, such as Hamlet. Ignacio's Answer is great and helped me find the files containing certain text. The only issue I was facing was that when running this command all the files would be listed, including one where the pattern did not show up.
One of the biggest advantages of digitizing notes, if you’re a student, is that you can search for text within Word documents and find where you last saw a phrase that you now need to consolidate with your new lesson. We’ve seen how to use DocFetcherQuickly Search Documents For Words with DocFetcherQuickly Search Documents For Words with DocFetcherRead More to search within PDF files, but if you already have PDF-XChange Viewer, Foxit or even Adobe Reader, did you know you can already search for text inside PDF documents without additional programs? I didn’t know this so I thought it might be something good to share.
This might be useful too, if you own a large collection of e-books in PDF. I know I have a few copies of the free manuals that MakeUseOf distributes, plus a lot of PDFs for each of my classes so knowing my preferred PDF viewer can do this is tremendously useful.
Search For A Certain Text In MacPDF-XChange Viewer [Windows]
Even with its free version, PDF-XChange Viewer has pretty mind-blowing featuresPDF-XChange Viewer - Give This Free PDF Reader A Second LookPDF-XChange Viewer - Give This Free PDF Reader A Second LookRead More. I’ve been using it for quite some time and absolutely adore the fact that you can customize keyboard shortcuts for any function. However, I didn’t realize you could use it to search entire directories until after searching all over the web for a PDF document search tool. It turns out the Search feature in PDF-XChange is pretty powerful and fast. You can either go to the Edit menu > Search or go to the drop-down menu for the Find feature.
You’ll see a sidebar on the right of the open PDF file. What is really neat is that if you have several PDF documents open in tabs, you can search through all of those open files, or only the current PDF. You can also specify a directory. In the Options buttons, you can also choose to search bookmarks and comments.
In the search term box, you can also use the drop-down menu to navigate to the Advanced Search function, which you can use to exclude words, include exact phrases, etc. Once you’ve completed the search, any result you click on will open up the respective file with the search term highlighted.
Adobe Reader [Cross-Platform]
We have seen many alternatives4 Very Light Alternatives to Adobe Reader4 Very Light Alternatives to Adobe ReaderAre you still using Adobe Reader for PDF documents? It's time to move on to an alternative PDF reader that is lightweight, launches quickly, and yet keeps your documents save.Read More to Adobe Reader, including a portable version, but if you’d rather stick with Adobe’s product, you can easily use the Full Reader Search (which you can invoke by pressing Ctrl + Shift + F) from the Find function’s drop-down menu or by heading to Edit > Search.
Like PDF-XChange, you will then able to search for text inside PDF documents in your specified locations.
After the search has returned results, clicking on any of them will open up the respective PDF file with the search term highlighted on the correct page.
If you want to preview or open up the results from different PDF files though, Adobe Reader will open them in separate windows since it doesn’t support tabbed documents.
What’s very impressive though, even more so than my beloved PDF-XChange Viewer’s Advanced Search, which has plenty for very specific searches.
Foxit Reader [Windows, Linux]
Foxit Reader is extremely popular! This lightweight viewer also has the Search function in the Find drop-down menu and under the Tools menu.
Similar to PDF-XChange, you’ll also see a sidebar on the right of the open PDF file, you can specify whether to look in the current document or in a specific directory, and the functionality will be really fast.
Unlike PDF-XChange however, you aren’t offered the option to search in all currently open PDF files.
It’s worth mentioning that if you don’t have any of these readers but you’re on a Windows computer, you can actually use Windows Desktop Search (the one you get from pressing Win key + F) to look for text within PDF files with the help of the Adobe PDF iFilter for 64-bit and 32-bit systems. If you do have the latest version of Adobe Reader, it will have bundled the iFilter add-in so you can use Windows Search to index PDF file contents without any problems. PDF-XChange enthusiasts also have the option to use the iFilter add-in.
If all you’re looking for is a small utility that’s fast and can search inside files, PDF or not, check out FileHound (here’s the portable version). I haven’t tried searching within scanned PDF files, but if anyone has, please share your experience in the comments.
What do you use to search for text inside PDF files?
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Learn how to find and replace code, text, or tags (with or without attributes) within a current document, folder, site, or across all open documents.
Use Dreamweaver’s powerful find and replace features to find and replace code, text, or tags (with or without attributes) within a current document, folder, site, or across all open documents.
You can also use powerful pattern-matching algorithms (regular expressions) for sophisticated find-and-replace operations.
Here are some of the things you can find and replace:
You can search for text, tags, and attributes even if there is no open document in Dreamweaver.
You can find all search terms across multiple documents, within the folder, or within your site.
Find and replace tags, attributes, and text in code
You can search for specific tags, attributes, and attribute values. For example, you can search for all img tags that have no Alt attribute.
You can also search for specific text strings that are within or not within a set of container tags. For example, you can search for the word Untitled contained in a title tag to find all the untitled pages on your site.
Find and replace tags, attributes, and text in code within the currently open document
Find and replace tags, attributes, and text in code across several documents:
Seaarch For A Certain Text In Macro
Select Find > Find and Replace.
Search For Certain Text In A Cell In Excel
To save queries, click the Save icon as shown in the Find and Replace dialog and choose the destination to save the file as .dwr file.
To load queries, click the Load icon and choose the .dwr query file from your computer.
By default, saving and loading search queries is not enabled in Dreamweaver 2017 and 2018 versions. However, if you really need to be able to save and load search queries, then complete the following steps to enable this feature.
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