Hello.

I have a large PDF document that I want to be able to search for keywords. The file in question is about 400MB. It is searchable but navigating through the file is difficult; searches are taking up to 10 seconds, if not more, and simply scrolling takes a few seconds to load the page.
I don't need to open it, per say. A simple grep-like functionality will suffice for me. The file is similar to a dictionary, so i just need it to find the keyword and list the line containing it.

Is there anything that can process this optimally?

Thank you.

You can try converting it to text with "pdftotext" first. Here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

1 members found this post helpful.

Try pdfgrep, works similar to grep.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thank you so much!
Both work well, but I just love the pdftotext utility. I love the simplicity; pure plain text . And I had it all along, had no idea it is included by default.