Add ability to search by color or strikeout

Josh Gebelein

We often get long pdf documents that are flattened text which have changes tracked in color or underline and deletions struck out. These changes can be very difficult and time-consuming to look for and currently requires flipping through every page and manually identifying each change.

Please add the ability to search for text of a selected color, or text that is not a selected color (regardless of what the text is) along with a sensitivity option. Also add the ability to search for strikeout and underline (perhaps also italic, bold…) format. This will help users can quickly find text that has been marked as changed.

This suggestion is only to search for flattened text that has native formatting associated in the pdf data, not a graphical search of images of text or hand-drawn strikeout lines. The native text data should be readily accessible and not a difficult feature to add to the search options.

Luke Shiras

I like this idea. In the mean time, have you tried the visual search tool? It may be clumsy for your specific need but might get you part of the way there.

Josh Gebelein

The visual search tool will only match the specific text that you take an image of. The request is to search for any text that matches the color, not the text content.

Luke Shiras

That was one of the limitations I was thinking of. I think visual search can recognize color so search for a red letter 'a' or other common letter and see if that finds most words. This might work for italics and bold too if they aren't too similar. Also, search for a line segment might find underscores but strikethrough not so much.

Your request is preferred but this might save some time while we wait for BB to include this feature.