Find and replace in a PDF
Search for a word, see every occurrence, replace them in one action. The rewritten line keeps its font, its size and its color — and if the new word is longer, the text recomposes instead of overflowing.
Free · 100% local — nothing is uploaded- 1Open your PDF.
- 2Search for the word, then type the one that should replace it.
- 3Replace one occurrence or all of them, and download.
How to find and replace text in a PDF
Open the document, search for the word: every occurrence shows with its page and its context. Type the word that should replace it, and replace one occurrence, or all of them. The rewritten line keeps the font embedded in the file, its size and its color: the replacement does not show, which is the whole point. If the new word runs longer than the old one, the line recomposes to the width of the block and the text below shifts within the page’s flow, instead of spilling into the margin or overlapping the next line. Every replacement undoes, a global one included. Everything is computed inside your browser: the document is not uploaded, and there is no account and no quota. The word searched for is found even when the file has cut it into several pieces, which happens almost always in a document produced by a word processor.
Changing a date, a name, an address across a whole file
This is the use that comes back most often: a contract template where the client’s name appears eleven times, a certificate to redate, a registered address that has changed, a company name after a takeover. Global replacement goes round the document and tells you how many occurrences it handled; which spares you the magnifying-glass reread to find the twelfth, the one that is always forgotten. A word broken at a line end by a hyphen, or scattered into several fragments by the software that produced the PDF, is sewn back together before the search.
What none of the big toolboxes offers
Neither iLovePDF nor Smallpdf nor PDF24 has a tool for this — Smallpdf has only a blog article explaining how to do without. The vendors that do it ask you to upload the file, and cap the number of free operations. Here, the search works on the document’s real text, the replacement changes the page’s content stream, and nothing leaves your device. To make a passage disappear instead of replacing it, redaction is what you need: it removes the characters from the file.
Frequently asked questions
Does the replaced text keep the document’s font?
Yes. Vélin reuses the font embedded in the file, its size and its color. That is what separates a real replacement from a label stuck over the page, which anyone spots at first glance.
What if the new word is longer than the old one?
The line recomposes to the width of the block, and the text below shifts within the page’s flow. You get neither overlap nor a word running out of the margin.
Can I replace every occurrence at once?
Yes, and you first see how many there are and where they sit. Every replacement undoes, a global one included, as long as you have not left the editor.
Does the search find a word broken across two lines?
Yes. A word the layout has broken with a hyphen, or that a PDF has scattered into several text fragments, is sewn back together before the search — the commonest case in documents produced by a word processor.
Can I replace text in a scanned PDF?
Not directly: a scan is an image, there is no text to search. Run it through character recognition first; the search will then work on what was recognized.
Can I strike out instead of replacing?
Yes: the same search serves to redact every occurrence of a pattern — an account number, an address — really removing them from the file.