How Can I Search for Comments in PDF?
Confession time. Tech 911 is a bit of a puzzle this week because the wide world of PDFs is confusing at best and generally more frustrating than anything else. You can find many different applications that allow you to open, edit, and tinker with PDFs . Some are free, but some are free and awesome, and most are moderate to outrageous money.
Our question writer has no problem viewing or opening PDFs this week. It’s easy. Even text searching the PDFs it generates isn’t all that difficult thanks to optical character recognition (OCR). I will allow Robert to describe the task before him:
“I read your recent Lifehacker article on creating searchable PDFs. I have found that Google Drive scanned documents and OCR documents are fine for all my needs except for one.
Google Drive has a handy feature that lets you highlight areas of your scanned document and add comments or notes. This appears on the scanned document as a translucent field, and the comment text appears on the screen when you look at it. However, a Google Drive search doesn’t seem to find any text in the comments, only OCR text is available. Having this feature would make crawled Google Drive documents a complete solution for me.
Do you know how to do what I described or am I missing something? “
So, I tried to do exactly that. I created a PDF in Google Drive by turning off my Android device, taking a photo of the document and uploading it to the cloud so that Google can recognize it and make its content searchable. This part is great. Worked like a charm.
Then I selected the text and added various comments. Finding them, as Robert noted, yields absolutely nothing. Google doesn’t identify them for some reason, although it seems like it would be trivial to enable it (either as part of the default search, or as a separate “search …” option that you can choose from).
My next thought was to convert the PDF to Google Doc (by right clicking and opening in Google Docs), but even the comments left on the text inside were also not searchable. Hmph.
I read somewhere that you can search for annotations you made in PDFs opened in Dropbox. I’ve tried this but to no avail; and Dropbox, unfortunately, only supports OCR in its business plans , which is less attractive than Google. I also tried OneDrive, but you cannot annotate PDFs in the web version of the tool, only in the service apps. It’s less useful even though the comments are searchable (which I doubt).
I know that Adobe Acrobat allows you to search PDF comments using the Advanced Search feature, and the same should be true in the free Adobe Reader application. Alas, this is not a cloud solution. Adobe Document Cloud won’t look in your comments either. (And Adobe Reader does not support OCR.)
What’s left? Crawl through a mountain of desktop PDF applications in the hope that both OCR searches and annotations can be performed. And even then, it’s not quite the solution you were probably looking for: something in the cloud that allows you to comment and search for comments without paying anything.
If you’re using macOS or iOS , PDF Expert 6 should let you search on the annotations you make (in those apps, I believe), and you can sync your PDFs with other cloud services to keep the annotations. The apps are not free, but they come with free trials, so you can at least see if they fit your needs. I’ve been using PDF Expert for years and love it.
Plus, the Xodo Windows PDF app (free!) Is another great option for creating and finding annotations if you don’t want to go the Adobe route.
However, these are all my ideas. I’ll end this column by asking the broader Lifehacker community: do you have any good suggestions? What cloud apps do you use to manage PDFs? Let me know in the comments and hopefully we can find the perfect solution to Robert’s search dilemma. Come up with a great offer and I’ll name it (and you!) In next week’s column.