How to Replace Text in PDF Files

It's common to have a PDF file and need to replace a specific word or text and then save it again with the same PDF format. To help with this, we'll introduce free programs that let you search and replace text inside a PDF file. Just keep in mind that the PDF must have been created with searchable text, not a scanned PDF.

These platforms come with other functions: adding annotations to PDFs, replacing text in several PDF files at once, setting the page range for text replacement (only on selected pages), viewing and editing the page content within the interface, and more.

PDF Replacer

We'll start with PDF Replacer, undoubtedly one of the best free programs for replacing text in one or more PDF documents. Simply add one or multiple PDF files (it supports batch processing) and then perform the search-and-replace text process.

The platform also offers the following features:

• Add multiple search-and-replace text operations. The program will automatically check those words in the input PDFs and then replace the input text with the output text.
• Enable the case-sensitive option to avoid replacing text that does not match uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Set the page range to replace text in the PDF.

PDF Replacer is free only for home or personal use. In this free version, it is limited to files with up to 99 pages; if the file has 100 pages or more, the platform will add a watermark to the document.

Sejda PDF Desktop

Sejda PDF Desktop is a multi-purpose program: make annotations in PDF files, extract pages from PDFs, compress PDFs, convert PDFs to Excel, add header and footer to PDFs, add watermark to PDFs, split PDFs by bookmarks, and of course, search and replace text in a PDF.

Within the search-and-replace text option, you can enable the "uppercase and lowercase" option to differentiate or insert text with uppercase and lowercase letters, only on selected pages.

Sejda PDF Desktop has a free plan with the following limitations: you can perform a maximum of 3 tasks per day and upload a PDF with a limit of up to 200 pages or 50 MB.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a complete office suite. Within its PDF viewer, you can use its drawing tool to add a PDF and then search and replace text. The tool offers the following functions:

• Enable uppercase and lowercase.
• Replace backwards.
• Match only whole words.
• Replace highlighted or all text.
• Replace only the current selection.

As you know, the platform is completely free, but the problem we found is that in some cases, when the PDF file has rich graphics, the output format after text replacement is not adequate.

With these programs to search, find and replace text in a PDF file and then save it back in the same format, you can easily correct a spelling mistake, a poorly phrased sentence, or outdated or incorrect data.