Ubuntu – Better search feature in pdf

evincepdfpdfgrepsoftware-recommendation

I want to search a word like fooonetwo in one pdf. So the point is I do not know the real ward is foo_one_two or foo.one.two or foo-one-two or foo-one_two! or … .

Or better to say I want to search for words which at the same time include foo and one and two. So I remember in the database we have kind of this feature : For example a query for looking for words which start by foo and also include one and two. So is there any PDF viewer to do that? What PDF viewer and how to do that.

Best Answer

You could use pdfgrep to search inside .pdf files using patterns. First you have to install pdfgrep package,

 sudo apt-get install pdfgrep

And your command should be,

pdfgrep -in 'foo.one.two' file.pdf

Dot inside the above pattern will match any character(It doesn't represent a literal dot). So it will find foo.one.two,foo-one-two,foo_one_two.

Syntax:

pdfgrep -in pattern file.pdf

Viewers With Annotation Viewing Capabilities

Open source viewers

Okular

A KDE based application, runs ok and looks ok in Gnome, one of the best open source applications that can both view and create annotations, note that this application can do standard and non standard annotations. You can create annotations that can be viewed by all viewers that support the pdf standard for annotations.

you can create annotations that does not interfere with the document, you will need to use Okular to view these, these can then be converted to standard annotations if you need to.

Evince

The default viewer on Ubuntu and most Gnome based desktops, the latest now have a somewhat limited support for standard pdf annotation viewing.

Proprietary Solutions

PDF Studio Pro

A very good fully capable PDF viewer and editor, from Qoppa Software, there are trial versions available for standard and pro, the pro verson has most of the features of Expensive tools from Adobe.

Some notable features of the pro version

Redaction, block out parts of documents you do not want people to see.
OCR, Make scanned pdf searchable
Digital Signature, sign documents adding image of signature.
Create and fill forms
Measure Tool, measure using scale factors, CAD type dimensioning.

Kami (Formerly Notable PDF)

Kami is a browser based solution, can view standard annotations, can create non standard annotations, this works with Google Chrome browser, you can save annotated PDFs on Google Drive read PDF documents from web pages,and download to desktop or save to Google Drive this can replace Chrome's default PDF viewer, there are free, premium and Work versions available the premium version is $15.00 a year and the work version is $50.00 a year.

Some work features

Ocr, create searchable pdf.
Unlimited e-Signature
Unlimited Files to Split
Unlimited Files to Merge

Ubuntu – The search for the ultimate pdf viewer

Short answer

Not that well known, but Master PDF Editor is one of the better "regular" Acrobat- like pdf options we have at the moment imo.

I don't have statistics on the speed, but compared to other pdf applications I have on my system, it performs remarkably well.

Limitations

Possible downside is that it is propriety software, and the free version has some limitations. These limitations are irrelevant to me however:

Following functions are locked in free version:

- Optimizing PDFs.
- Function "Paste to Multiple Pages"
- Add/Edit Document Actions.
- Manage Document JavaScript.
- Page Properties options.
- Sign PDF document with digital signature.
- Add Headers and Footers to PDFs.
- Add Watermarks to PDFs.
- Add Background to PDFs.
- 256 bit AES encryption.