Text Search

PSPDFKit offers many different ways to search a document, including a highly customizable UI component.

Searching via PSPDFViewController

In most cases, you’ll just want to trigger a search inside the PSPDFViewController. This can be done by calling searchForString:options:sender:animated:. We’ll automatically anchor the popover to the search button or show a modal dialog for compact size classes like the iPhone. Options can take one parameter, PSPDFViewControllerSearchHeadlessKey, which invokes a search but does not trigger any UI. This is great for unobtrusive highlighting:

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let searchString = "Example Search Text"
pdfController.search(for: searchString, options: [PSPDFViewControllerSearchHeadlessKey: true], sender: nil, animated: true)

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NSString *searchString = @"Example Search Text";
[pdfController searchForString:searchString options:@{PSPDFViewControllerSearchHeadlessKey: @YES} sender:nil animated:YES];

Searching Manually

To search text inside a document, create an instance of PSPDFTextSearch, passing in the loaded PSPDFDocument via its initializer. Searching can be triggered via calling searchForString:, which will start a search on a background queue. Implement PSPDFTextSearchDelegate on the receiving object and set the text search object’s delegate to your object to be notified of search result updates.

Important: You need to retain the text search object while search is running. Otherwise, any running search will automatically be canceled and your delegate will not get called.

Specify Search Options

Before triggering a search, you can configure various search options:

• compareOptions (see NSStringCompareOptions)
• previewRange
• searchableAnnotationTypes
• maximumNumberOfSearchResults

Changing these properties once a search operation is running is not supported and might result in unexpected behavior.

Highlighting Search Results

Search results, represented by PSPDFSearchResult, offer both the content (selection) as a PSPDFTextBlock and a previewText. You can use these objects to represent your own search result list or to manually highlight parts of a page.

The PSPDFSearchHighlightViewManager manages the task of showing and hiding search results. It can be accessed via the searchHighlightViewManager property on PSPDFViewController, and it offers a way to both add (addHighlightSearchResults:animated:) and clear (clearHighlightedSearchResultsAnimated:) search results.

The PSPDFSearchHighlightView will be added on top of a visible PSPDFPageView for each search result. It can be customized via UIAppearance — see selectionBackgroundColor and cornerRadiusProportion.