In the screenshot examples here, we’re searching a multi-page product info PDF file for the term for a specific term, and you’ll notice the matches are highlighted throughout the PDF file opened within Preview.

Find matches highlighted in yellow, use the “next” and “previous” buttons to jump to the next and prior search matches in the PDF.Enter the search term you want to search the PDF file for, the search box appears in the upper right corner of the Preview window.Pull down the “Edit” menu and choose “Find” then select the “Find” option in the submenu, alternatively you can use the Command+F keystroke.Open the PDF file you want to search through in Preview *.It’s extremely fast even when searching within large PDF documents. Preview for Mac can search within PDF files for matching text, phrases, words, or other terms. Search in PDF Files on Mac within Preview Of course you could first locate a PDF file, then search within that opened PDF file for a matched term using the Preview trick outlined here. We are not talking about searching for PDF files on the Mac file system, though if you want to quickly locate PDF files on a Mac, the best way to do that would be to use Spotlight to find the specific file type match on the computer, which in this case would be “kind:pdf”, which effectively locates all PDF files on the Mac.

To be perfectly clear, we’re talking about searching within a PDF document for a term match, for example if you wanted to looking within a specific document for “key term”.

Mac preview not opening pdf