Finding Text

Basic Find

Ctrl+F opens the Find bar.

1. Type your search term.
2. Enter or the ▶ button jumps to the next match.
3. Shift+Enter or ◀ goes to the previous match.
4. Esc closes the bar.

Matches are highlighted in the page. The status bar shows match N of M.

Find Options

Open the Find bar's options panel for:

Find and Replace

Ctrl+H opens the replace dialog. Works on:

• Page text (where selectable / OCR'd).
• Annotation text (sticky notes, text boxes, text callouts).

Page text replacement writes changes back to the PDF content stream. Annotation text replacement updates the relevant annotation's Contents property.

Highlight All Matches

The Find bar has a Highlight All toggle. When on, every match on the current page is highlighted with a yellow overlay until you close Find.

Search Limitations

• Image-only pages without OCR — search returns no results. Run OCR first (see 06.1).
• Encoded / non-Unicode text — some older PDFs use custom encodings that don't index properly. Spark falls back to glyph-level search; accuracy depends on the PDF.
• Vertical / rotated text — search works but highlights may appear on the rotated bounds.

Searching Annotations

The Comments side panel has its own search box:

1. Open the Comments panel.
2. Type in its search field.
3. Results filter the comment list.
4. Click a result to jump to the annotation.

This searches:

• Sticky note bodies.
• Text box contents.
• Text callout contents.
• Stamp labels (if custom).
• Annotation comments (Properties → Contents).

Go To Page

Ctrl+G — type a page number to jump directly. Not a text search, but often useful alongside Find for navigating long documents.

Keyboard Shortcuts Summary