PDF is a popular file format for electronic documents. It is sometimes used for ebooks. PDF files can be annotated and highlighted like other electronic documents, although sometimes this requires an additional processing step called OCR.
OCR PDF
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It turns an image of text into selectable, editable and machine-readable text. It is sometimes necessary to apply OCR to a PDF document to turn it into usable text. If you can’t select a section of text in a PDF by clicking and dragging your mouse, then it needs to be run through OCR.
This can be done with Acrobat:
Or with free online tools - no registration, just drag & drop
Search PDFs
You can use the Ctrl-F (Cmd-F on a Mac) keyboard shortcut to search a PDF file. It may be necessary to run OCR first in some cases. Note that this search function works on web pages, text documents and spreadsheets as well.
