How to search a PDF on an Android.
Learn a quick, automated shortcut for searching a PDF on your Android in five simple steps.
Are you tired of having to manually scan a PDF on your phone to find a specific word, phrase, or idea? There’s a solution. Keep reading to learn a quick and easy shortcut for searching PDFs on your Android.
A five-step guide to searching a PDF on your Android.
Mobile PDF searching doesn’t have to be a challenge. Follow along with this simple, five-step process that details how to search a PDF on an Android.
- Navigate to the PDF reader on your phone and launch the application.
- Select the specific PDF you want to search.
- Look toward the upper right on your screen and locate the magnifying glass.
- Tap the magnifying glass and type in the text you want to search.
- Navigate through the search results that pop up.
With more people using smartphones, downloads like eBook files and PDF files have taken the place of traditional printed media. Your Android device can be an easier way to carry, send, and edit PDFs because you can access them anytime and anywhere without needing to be at the office or at your house.
How OCR helps search PDFs.
Sometimes you’ll find that the text in a PDF is not searchable. If the PDF has been created from an image, even if that image includes text, the data might not be saved as text. If you scan a few legal forms or historical documents, for example, your computer might save the scan as an image file.
However, text recognition is possible with optical character recognition (OCR), which is the process that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format. Luckily, it’s not difficult to create OCR-enabled PDFs, and you can do it on your Android.
To take advantage of OCR technology to search PDFs on your Android, download the Adobe Scan app. You’ll just need an image file to work with instead of a pre-existing PDF. You can use saved photos, including screenshots, or take a new scan of a paper document to create a PDF with OCR technology automatically applied. Select the images you want to save as a PDF, name the new PDF file, and then you’ll be able to search for the text in that document on your Android device.
Search multiple PDF files at once on Android.
You can search multiple PDF files at once on your Android device using the Adobe Reader app.
Follow these steps to search for multiple files on Android:
- Open the Adobe Reader app on your Android.
- Tap the Search button on the bottom right of your screen.
- Type your search. This can be either the name of the file or any words that may appear in it.
- You will see the search results from files on your phone.
- You can search for files that are not only in the Reader app by selecting the menu options labeled “On this phone,” “Adobe cloud storage,” and “Shared files.”
Unlock your PDF potential.
Looking to amplify your workflow? Working with PDFs — and a top-notch PDF reader — can make all the difference. Use PDFs from your Android device to create forms, sign contracts quickly, redact confidential information, and expedite your workflow overall.
Your PDF search process has never been easier with quick shortcuts like searching a PDF on your Android. The good news? There are plenty more tips and tricks where that one comes from — especially when you use a high-quality PDF reader to edit, view, and manage your PDFs.
Evolve and optimize your workflow — discover what more you can do with Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat online services to convert, share, and send PDFs.