Will it find text in scanned PDFs?

No — text extraction requires extractable text. Run OCR PDF first.

In v1 the input is a literal string with optional case-sensitivity / whole-word toggles. Regex support is on the roadmap.

Are the files uploaded?

No — local extraction and matching.

Find Text Locator

Find every occurrence of text in a PDF and report page number + surrounding context — for review, redaction prep, or migration planning.

Your files never leave your browser. All processing happens on your device — nothing is uploaded.

1. Upload your file

How does the Find Text Locator work?

Find every occurrence of a text string in a PDF and report it back with page number, character index, and surrounding context. Useful for: review prep ("how many times does this term appear?"), redaction planning ("show me everywhere SSN appears"), migration audits ("which pages reference the old company name?"), or just sanity-checking a document. v1 is information-only — actual find-and-replace would require rewriting the underlying text stream, which pdf-lib does not support; we flag this honestly and suggest the Permanent Redaction + Edit Text Overlay chain for manual replacement.

🔒 Security & Privacy

All processing happens on your device. Your files never leave your browser, never touch our servers, and are not stored anywhere. Close the tab and the file is gone.

📱 Use it on any device

Works in any modern browser — Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, and tablets. No installation, no app to download. Just open the page and start.

⚡ Quick & easy

Drag, drop, click. Most files process in seconds, not minutes. No watermarks added to your output, no per-day limits, and the tool always shows the result before asking you to download.

🎁 Always free, no signup

Free to use, every time. No account creation, no email required, no “trial” that converts to a paid plan. We make money from ads so you don’t have to pay.

Frequently asked

pdf-lib (the library this tool runs on) does not expose APIs to rewrite text content in PDF content streams. Real find-and-replace needs deep PDF object manipulation — typically a server-side qpdf or Acrobat operation. Recasting as a locator is the honest v1.