PDF search library for iOS

Search across PDF documents, pages, and annotations for matching text. Nutrient iOS SDK offers developers an API for programmatic full-text search, as well as a customizable UI for searching and highlighting relevant matches. Scanned documents have no searchable text until you make them searchable with OCR.

Key capabilities

• Full-text search — Programmatically or by using the UI
• Indexed search — Search inside multiple PDFs at once
• Annotation search — Find specific PDF annotations
• Customizable UI — Adjust the search form to match your look and feel
• Extendable — Add annotation, extraction, redaction, and more

Guides for search

Search for text in a PDF
How to search for text within a single PDF document

Search for annotations in a PDF
How to search for text contained in annotations

Index multiple documents
How to index multiple PDF documents for use in indexed full-text search

Indexed search matching options
How to configure matching options for indexed full-text search

Generate indexed search previews
How to generate a preview containing ambient text surrounding a match

Encrypt the search index database
How to encrypt the SQLite database created by Nutrient

Custom tokenizer for search index
Learn about the default tokenizer and how to use a custom one

Custom SQLite library
How to link your app to a custom build of SQLite

Spotlight indexing
How to index documents with Spotlight for native device searching