Edit & Sign
Pro planFind and replace text in a PDF
Search a PDF and replace every occurrence of a word or phrase across the whole document — a real content-stream rewrite, done in your browser.
- Processed on your device
- No watermarks
- Included with Pro — $10/mo or $49/yr
Find & Replace PDF runs on your device like every other tool — it just needs a Pro plan to unlock. See what Pro includes.
Overview
About Find & Replace PDF
SwiftPDFEdit's find and replace works on the real text of a PDF: it searches every page for your term and rewrites each match in the document's content stream, so the replacement is part of the file rather than a patch drawn over it. You can replace one occurrence at a time or every match in the document in a single pass.
This is the fix for the mistakes that are scattered rather than isolated — a client's name misspelled in thirty places across a proposal, last year's date carried through a renewed contract, a rebranded product name, an office address that changed after the template was written, or a placeholder that survived into the final draft.
Search options cover the cases that matter. Match case distinguishes “IT” from “it”; whole word stops “art” from matching inside “start”; and you can restrict a replace to specific pages when the same string legitimately appears elsewhere. Every replacement is counted and reported, so you know exactly how many occurrences changed instead of guessing.
Under the hood the editor prefers a single document-wide rewrite and falls back to a page-by-page block rewrite when that is not available, which is why replace-all stays reliable across very different PDF generators. Either way each rewritten block keeps its original font, size and colour, and the result stays selectable and searchable. Replace is a tracked step in the editor's history, so a bad replace-all is one undo away.
The same limits apply as to any in-place text editing: scanned pages hold images rather than characters and must be OCR'd first, there is no reflow so a much longer replacement crowds its line, and text can only be re-emitted in a font that can encode it. Everything runs locally in your browser — a document full of client names never leaves your machine.
Step by step
How to find and replace text in a PDF
Open the SwiftPDFEdit editor
Go to swiftpdfedit.com/editor and sign in, then load the PDF you want to change.
Open find and replace
Press Ctrl+H (Cmd+H on a Mac) or click the find icon in the toolbar to open the search bar with its replace field.
Enter the search term
Type the word or phrase to find. Matches are counted as you type and you can step through them with the previous and next controls.
Set match case and whole word
Turn on Match case to distinguish capitalisation, and Whole word so a short term does not match inside longer words.
Replace one or replace all
Replace the current match to work through the document deliberately, or Replace all to rewrite every occurrence in one pass. The number of changes is reported.
Export the updated PDF
Click Export. The replacements are already in the document's content stream, so the exported file is clean and fully searchable.
Questions
Find & Replace PDF — frequently asked questions
Yes. Each match is rewritten in the page's content stream, so the new wording is genuinely part of the document. It is not a white box with replacement text drawn on top, and the old text is not left hidden in the file.
Yes — Replace all rewrites every occurrence in the document in a single pass and tells you how many it changed. You can also restrict a replace to specific pages when the same string legitimately appears elsewhere.
Only if you want it to be. Search is case-insensitive by default; turn on Match case to distinguish “IT” from “it”. Whole word is available too, so “art” will not match inside “start”.
No. Find and replace works on literal text, which keeps a document-wide rewrite predictable. For structural changes, edit the affected blocks directly with the Edit text tool.
PDF has fixed page geometry and no reflow, so a much longer replacement crowds the line it sits on rather than repaginating the document. Replacing text with something of similar length gives the cleanest result.
Because a scan contains an image of text, not text. There is nothing to search until the page has been through OCR to create a real text layer; OCR is part of the Pro plan.
Yes. Replace-all is a single tracked step in the editor's history, so one undo restores the document exactly as it was before the operation.
In-place editing of a document's original text is part of the full editor included with Pro ($10/month or $49/year). The Free plan covers the core tools and the editor's annotation features, with a limit of 3 tasks a day and 5 saved documents.
No. Your file never leaves your device — all processing happens locally in your browser. Searching and rewriting both happen in your browser tab, so a document full of client names or salary figures is never transmitted, and there is no server-imposed size limit.
Keep going
Related tools
The rest of the 21-tool workshop — every one of them runs in the same tab, on the same device.
Your file stays exactly where it is
Create a free account and find and replace text in a PDF in the same tab you are reading this in. Nothing to install, nothing to upload.
Free plan: 5 saved documents, 3 tasks a day, no watermarks.