How to search inside a PDF on Mac
Find any word, step through every match, and handle the one case where search finds nothing — with Verso.
Searching a document is the fastest way to answer a question about it, and the fastest way to discover that it is not the kind of document you thought it was.
Search, and every other way of finding your place is free and always will be. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing is watermarked.
Search, step by step
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Open find
Press ⌘+F or choose the search tab in the sidebar. A field appears at the top of the pane.
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Type what you are looking for
Matches appear as you type, grouped by page, each with a little of the surrounding text so you can tell the useful hit from the incidental one.
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Step through the matches
⌘+G moves to the next match and ⌘+⇧+G moves back. Each one is brought into view and highlighted on the page. -
Jump straight to one
Click any result in the list to go to it directly, which is quicker than stepping through forty hits to reach the fifth page.
When search finds nothing
If you are certain a word is on the page and search insists it is not, the document is almost certainly a scan. A scanned page is a photograph of a page: it looks like text and contains none. There is nothing for search to look through.
The fix is text recognition. Run Make Searchable over the document once and its words become real text — selectable, searchable, copyable and editable — from then on. Verso will tell you when a document already carries real text, so you never run it needlessly.
Try to select a line with your pointer. If a selection highlight appears, the page has text and your search term genuinely is not there. If nothing selects, or the whole page selects as one block, it is a picture and needs recognising first.
Other reasons a search comes up short
| What is happening | What to do |
|---|---|
| The word is hyphenated across a line break | Search for the first half. A line-broken word is stored as two pieces in most documents. |
| The document uses a different spelling or a ligature | Try a shorter fragment — searching for “organis” finds both organise and organisation. |
| The text is inside an image on an otherwise normal page | Only that region is a picture. Recognition will pick it up along with everything else. |
| The word is in an annotation rather than the page | The annotations list in the sidebar is the place to review comments; page search looks at the page. |
Searching across many documents
Search inside Verso looks inside the document you have open. To search a folder of documents at once, your Mac's own Spotlight already does it — and it can only see inside documents that carry real text, which is another reason to run recognition over a folder of scans rather than leaving them unsearchable.
Batch recipes exist for exactly this: set up a job once to recognise text across a whole folder, run it, and a filing cabinet becomes searchable.
Frequently asked questions
How do I search inside a PDF on a Mac?
Press ⌘+F, type what you want, and step through the matches with ⌘+G. Results are grouped by page with surrounding context so you can pick the right one.
Why does searching my PDF find nothing?
Because the document is a scan — a picture of a page rather than a page with text in it. Run Make Searchable over it and search will work from then on.
Is PDF search case-sensitive?
No. Searching for a word finds it whatever case it appears in.
Can I search several PDFs at once?
Verso searches the document you have open. For a whole folder, your Mac's Spotlight already does it — but only inside documents that carry real text, which is why recognising a folder of scans is worth doing once.
Does searching a document send anything anywhere?
No. Search runs on your Mac, like everything else. There is no server involved and no query leaves the machine.
How do I find my own comments rather than page text?
Use the annotations list in the sidebar. It collects every mark you have made in one place, which is a different thing from searching the page.