Jacob Collins Jacob is the JPedal Product Lead and specialises in PDF creation and manipulation. He also develops Salesforce backend systems and contributes to marketing and support. Outside work, he’s a 1900‑rated chess player, guitarist, and French learner.

How to search for text in a PDF file without opening it

48 sec read

Search PDF for text (without opening it)

Search PDF for text (without opening it)
Can you determine if a PDF is searchable for text without opening it? Well you will need some special software. This might be useful if you want to search for keywords on a PDF, without having to manually open it.

In this tutorial we are going to be using the Java PDF library JPedal.

To search a PDF file for text without opening it:

1. First you need to download a copy of the jar and add it to your project.

2. Then you can call the various API methods

Extract words on a page


Extract unstructured text


Extract structured text
You need to have a tagged PDF file for this to work

3. You can then search through the returned text

int index = text.indexOf("Java");

This tutorial showed you how you can search a PDF for text without opening it. Learn more on our support site.



The JPedal PDF library allows you to solve these problems in Java


Jacob Collins Jacob is the JPedal Product Lead and specialises in PDF creation and manipulation. He also develops Salesforce backend systems and contributes to marketing and support. Outside work, he’s a 1900‑rated chess player, guitarist, and French learner.