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In Windows' Acrobat reader, I can do an advanced search for some phrase, and a left pane displays all search results, which I can click on. Is there any similar program for Ubuntu?

I'm using Ubuntu 12, and couldn't install acroread. The other applications (okular, evince) have a find/search command but no feature to display all results. I could do a pdftotext and grep on a console, but this is not as nice as being able to click on results like the Windows app has.

Is there an Ubuntu app that has this feature?

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  • Why can't you install acroread? What does happen when you run sudo apt-get install acroread?
    – Eric Carvalho
    Mar 2, 2013 at 12:50
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    @EricCarvalho Not much will happen, because iirc Canonical partner repo (Software Sources > Other software > Canonical Partners) has to be enabled first - is this what the asker means with not being able to install it?
    – pileofrocks
    Mar 2, 2013 at 13:33
  • When I try to install acroread, I get: > sudo apt-get install acroread [sudo] password for maths: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package acroread When I tried the same command on another computer (my laptop, which also runs Ubuntu 12), it does work fine.
    – user64647
    Mar 4, 2013 at 5:48
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    @user64647 Did you try to enable the Canonical Partner repository as I suggested in my previous comment? Your other computer might have had that already enabled. ps. When when you answer to comments, put "@username" in the beginning of the comment, that way the user gets an automatic notification about the reply.
    – pileofrocks
    Mar 4, 2013 at 20:45
  • @pileofrocks Thanks. Enabling Canonical Partner worked. If you post your comment as an answer I can accept it.
    – user64647
    Mar 14, 2013 at 12:13

2 Answers 2

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I don´t know if there is another Reader which offers this feature but installing adobe acrobat reader should not be a problem, how did you try to install it?

sudo apt-get install acroread

should work!

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  • I think Canonical partner repo has to enabled first... can't check this on 12.04, but at least that is the case with 12.10.
    – pileofrocks
    Mar 2, 2013 at 13:32
  • @pileofrocks Thanks! I was able to get acroread installed after enabling Canonical partners.
    – user64647
    Mar 8, 2013 at 9:20
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Instead of using a PDF viewer, you could outsource the search job to Recoll, Linux' most powerful desktop search engine. Recoll creates a full-text index of your PDF files (and many other file types), which you can then search through as if you were using Google. It's capable of searching through individual files and showing all search results in a neat overview.

You can get the newest release from the developer's official PPA by typing:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on && apt-get update && apt-get install recoll

Unfortunately there's still no tutorial on how to use Recoll here on Askubuntu (something I hope to do in the future), but the official documentation is very detailed.

After you've set up Recoll you can search through a specific document by setting the search mode to query language and wording your search like this:

filename:document.pdf searchterm

You can access the result overview of a specific document by clicking on Snippets. If you have evince installed (the standard PDF viewer Ubuntu ships with), clicking on the page number will direct you to the corresponding page and pass the search term to evince's inbuilt search. You can then highlight the search term by hitting CTRL + F in evince.

Recoll's advantage over the inbuilt search in PDF viewers like evince or acroread is that it operates with a pregenerated Index. This makes searching for a term almost instant, even when working with thousands of documents.

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