Searching and selecting text

Finding words

Click Find on the window’s bar or on the Home tab, or press ⌘F (Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux). The find bar opens under the ribbon.
Type in Find in document. Nixt PDF searches as you type.
Read the count at the right of the box: 3 of 12 means you are on the third of twelve matches. No matches means the words aren’t in the document’s text.
Press Enter or click the down arrow (Next match) to go to the next match. Click the up arrow (Previous match) to go back.
To close the find bar, press Esc while typing in the box, click the X (Close search), or press ⌘F again.

Every match is highlighted on its page, and the match you’re on is highlighted more strongly than the rest. Going past the last match wraps round to the first.

The first match shown is the first one on or after the page you’re reading, so searching from page 40 doesn’t send you back to page 1.

How matching works

Search behaviour	Example
Capitals are ignored	`invoice` finds Invoice and INVOICE.
Accents are ignored	`cafe` finds café.
Parts of words match	`form` finds form and information.
Phrases match even when the document stores them in pieces	`Payment due` is found even if the page draws the two words separately.

A search stops counting at 2,000 matches.

Closing the find bar clears the highlights.

Selecting text

With the Select tool in use (Home › Select, or press Esc to put any other tool away):

Drag across the words you want. A selection can run across lines and across pages.
Double-click a word to select it.

To clear a selection, click the X (Clear the selection) on the selection bar.

Doing something with selected text

As soon as text is selected, the selection bar appears at the bottom of the page area. It repeats the start of what you selected, so you can check it.

Button	What it does
Copy	Copies the selected words. The message says Copied.
Highlight	Highlights the selected words.
Underline	Underlines them.
Cross out	Strikes them through.
Edit text	Opens the Edit text tool on the line where the selection starts, with the selected words already selected, so typing replaces them. See Editing text.
Redact	Asks, then removes the selected words from the document for good. See Redaction.

Right-click the selection for a menu with the same Highlight, Underline, Cross out, Edit text and Redact commands.

Some things to know:

Highlight, Underline and Cross out mark each selected line exactly, on every page the selection covers, in the colour last chosen in a tool strip (yellow until you pick another). They are ordinary comments; see Comments and markup.
Redact works on one page at a time. If the selection runs across pages, the message says Redact one page at a time, or use Find and redact to take a word out of every page.
Edit text says That text cannot be changed where it is. when the line can’t be edited — text drawn at an angle, for example.
On a document that is Read only, only Copy is available.

Saving all the text

To save the words of the whole document as a plain text file:

On the View tab, click Text… (or choose More › Save the text…).
In the Save the text dialog, choose a folder and name, and confirm. The name starts as the document’s name with .txt.

The text is laid out in lines and paragraphs, in the order the page is read rather than the order the file happens to store it, so a page turned on its side comes out the right way round. Pages are separated by a blank line.

If the document has no text at all, the message says There is no text in this document to save — it is a scan. and nothing is saved.

To save the document as a web page instead, with headings and paragraphs, see Printing and export.