Open And Read A PDF In Your Browser

This is a reader rather than a preview. A rail of page thumbnails runs down the side, the page you are on is drawn large beside it, and the toolbar carries what a reader needs: which page, how big, which way up. Zoom steps from 25% to 400% or snaps to Fit Width and Fit Page. Arrow keys and Page Up and Page Down turn pages, plus and minus zoom, and the search box is one Tab away.

The Search Box Is The Point

Every browser can already show you a PDF. What sends people looking for an online PDF viewer is a question: which page mentions the notice period, did the invoice say net 30. So this reads the text of every page in the background and searches the whole document at once. You get a count, a list of hits with the words either side of each one, and arrows that walk you through them - and each hit is marked in place on the page, not merely named. Accents and curly quotes are ignored, so cafe finds café. Match Case and Whole Words Only are in Options when a loose match finds too much.

Who It Is For

Mostly people who are not developers: someone sent a contract as an attachment, a student with a course reader, anyone on a borrowed computer. If you want to open a PDF online and find one sentence in it, this does that in a tab. Copy Text On This Page puts the current page on your clipboard; Download Text saves the whole document as a .txt file.

How It Works, And What It Cannot Do

Mozilla's pdf.js runs inside your browser: it draws the pages and hands over the text layer, all on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why this works on a plane and why a confidential document stays confidential. The limits are worth knowing. A scanned PDF is a photograph of a page, so there is no text in it to find - the pages display perfectly and the search box finds nothing, and no viewer without OCR can change that. The reading pane is a picture of the page, so you cannot drag a cursor across it; Copy and Download are the way to get the words out. Search stops at page 500, and an encrypted file asks for its password first. Need something else done to it? Try PDF To Image or Split PDF.

Then Put It Somewhere People Can Read It

Publish A Share Page makes a small web page holding the first page as a picture and the extracted text underneath: a readable, linkable version of what was an attachment. It is not a copy of the PDF, and the page says so. It goes live on a free OxyPages link with HTTPS in seconds and no account; the link lasts 30 minutes unless you claim it, claiming is free, and a claimed page can carry your own address or a custom domain on a paid plan. See how it works for the rest.