Search Text Across Multiple PDFs

Find a word or phrase across your PDFs, then save filenames, page numbers and matching context in a CSV.

Find the phrase. Keep a useful reference list.

Choose your PDFs, enter known wording and review matching filenames, physical PDF pages and snippets. Save the report for a review checklist or spreadsheet. For example, locate “payment terms” across a dozen contracts and keep the matching references together.

  1. Choose text-based PDF files.
  2. Enter a word or phrase and press Enter (or choose Search PDFs). Open Search options if you need case, whole-word, file or physical-page filters.
  3. Search and review each document’s match total and first matching passages. Expand the preview for more matches. Named warnings appear when a file or page could not be searched.
  4. Download the results CSV.

Preview searches are free. Try one completed CSV without an account; further results use your SuperTool account. Re-downloading the same completed result does not use another credit.

Common questions

Can this search scanned PDFs?

The search needs an existing text layer. Image-only pages and pages without extractable text are marked in the report. Use OCR first when your PDF contains only scanned images. A missing match does not prove that the wording is absent from the visible page.

What wording differences are normalized?

Common presentation ligatures such as fi and fl, curly quotes and apostrophes, dash variants, non-breaking spaces and whitespace are normalized. Soft hyphens are removed. Line breaks within a page can match spaces. Accents and ordinary punctuation remain significant. Optional joining of a word hyphenated at a line ending is off by default; it can also join genuinely hyphenated words. Text is never joined across PDF pages. Snippets show normalized extracted text. This is literal text search, with no OCR or semantic question answering.

What does the CSV include?

The report includes each matching filename, physical PDF page, occurrence and context, plus the query and match options. It also includes named coverage rows for unreadable, password-protected, corrupted, incomplete or limited files and pages. Duplicate filenames have distinct file IDs. Many matches on a page remain separate occurrences.

Will accented text open correctly in Excel?

The CSV uses UTF-8 with a byte-order mark for Excel. Cells that could be interpreted as spreadsheet formulas receive a leading apostrophe. This applies to text from PDFs and other supplied text.

What are the limits?

Up to 20 PDFs, 100 MiB per file, 500 MiB total and 10,000 physical pages per search, with up to 10,000 returned hits. Very large text layers or complex files can reach text, memory, time or output limits sooner; the report marks incomplete coverage. Search phrases can contain up to 256 characters.

Where are my PDFs processed?

PDFs are uploaded to SuperTool’s server for processing. The tool reads your PDFs to create the report; it does not rewrite your originals. Do not upload documents you are not permitted to process with an online service.

Need help exploring meaning as well as exact wording? Try Document Agent.