How to search and copy text in a PDF

2 min read·24 July 2026

You use Ctrl+F to search text in a PDF, but that only works if the PDF contains real text. Here you learn when searching works, when it does not, and how to extract text regardless.

When does Ctrl+F work in a PDF?

Searching only works if the PDF has a text layer. That is the case for PDFs created from Word, Excel, InDesign or other software. A scanned PDF lacks that layer: you can see the text but the computer does not recognise it. In that case Ctrl+F gives no results.

How do I make a scan searchable?

Use PDFrust's OCR tool to recognise text in a scan. The tool uses Tesseract.js to identify characters. Choose the document language for the best accuracy. You get a .txt file back that is fully searchable.

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Extracting all text content at once

Want to copy all the text from a PDF at once (not via Ctrl+C paragraph by paragraph but everything together), use the PDF-to-text tool. It extracts the text layer of all pages in one go and downloads a .txt file you can open in any editor.

Copying text gives garbled characters: now what?

Some PDFs use embedded fonts with non-standard character encodings. The tool may see letters but cannot correctly convert them to characters. The PDF-to-text tool tries to interpret the text layer; if that does not work, OCR is the only solution.