Highlight all instances of a given word in a PDF.

Question

I want to highlight, preferably permanently, all instances of a search result in a PDF. For example, I want to highlight all examples of the word 'class' in a piece about Karl Marx to make finding the material I need to make notes on easier.

I suspect the reason I can't do this on either Foxit or Adobe Reader is that they both re-scan the document every time you highlight a search result, and this takes a long time.

Is it possible at all?

Solution 1

Open the PDF using Firefox browser and click the "highlight all" button after you open the Find dialog.

Find Dialog

Solution 2

Once you have pressed Ctrl+F and searched the word, if you press Shift+Enter, it would higlight all the words matching your inquiry

Solution 3

The workaround I discovered is to use the redaction tool. Change your redaction property from black to yellow, then use the "Text Overlay" function to re-enter that same word on the redaction mark

Comments

[Sean_999]

Unfortunately, the dialog shown in the linked image provided by Greg H is not the dialog that opens when searching a PDF document in Firefox, if the Adobe Reader plugin for Firefox is installed. The FF Adobe plugin does not offer "highlight all". In Chrome (for which I don't have the Adobe Reader plugin installed) the native PDF viewer does not offer the "highlight all" option.

[Khalid]

While this works (upvoted!) it's an ugly hack that causes Acrobat to consider the selected text as redacted and so this may be undesirable if the PDF is ever re-saved.

[Community]

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