The loop below suits a word that turns up a handful of times: a misspelled name, an old phone number, last year’s date. For a word that turns up hundreds of times, the last section has a faster route.
How do you find and replace in PDF Textfix?
- Choose Edit > Find > Find Line… (⌘F) and type the word as it is printed.
- Press Return or double-click the matching line. The editor opens over it, in the line’s own font.
- Type the replacement and press Return to apply it.
- Press ⌘G for the next match, or ⇧⌘G for the previous one, and repeat.
Tab applies an edit and opens the next line, handy when matches sit on consecutive lines. In the Lines pane (⌥⌘L), the Edited filter (“Show only the lines you edited”) lists every line you have changed, across all loaded pages; read that list before you save. Undo (⌘Z) takes back one applied edit at a time.
Why is there no Replace All?
Because every match is a different edit. The same word can sit in a heading in one font, in a table cell with a neighbor two millimeters away, and in a sentence whose font subset lacks the letter your replacement needs. PDF Textfix checks each edit before it applies it, as its description says: “Before PDF Textfix applies an edit, it checks that every other character on the page stays where it was” and “When a check fails, it refuses the edit, says why, and leaves the file as it was.”
A blind replace across forty matches would skip those checks, or stop at the first refusal and leave you to work out which matches changed. One at a time, you see each line in place, with any fallback character in orange. Text that several pages draw from one source, such as some running headers, is a single edit already: when PDF Textfix can edit it, one change updates every page, and the bar says how many places changed.
Which editors offer Replace All?
Not every PDF editor does. Adobe’s help page Searching PDFs, last updated October 3, 2022, for the Acrobat of that time and for Acrobat 2017 and 2020, says of the Find toolbar: “You replace text one instance at a time. You cannot make a global change throughout a PDF or across multiple PDFs.” Adobe’s current Acrobat help has no page on replacing text that we could find, so check the version you use.
UPDF’s guide, dated August 6, 2026, says a click on Select All in its Replace With panel can “update every match”. The guide does not say what happens to the layout when the replacement is longer than the word it replaces, so check the pages after a bulk replace in any editor.
Converting to Word gives you Word’s own Replace All, on a converted copy. Microsoft warns that “The converted document might not have a perfect page-to-page correspondence with the original. For example, lines and pages may break at different locations.” That suits a document you mean to rebuild, not one whose layout must stay exactly as it was.
What should you do with dozens of matches?
Under a dozen or so, the find-edit-⌘G loop is quick. With hundreds, such as a company renamed throughout a long manual, go back to the source document, replace there and export a new PDF. How to replace a word or a line in a PDF walks through single replacements, and the help page lists every way to reach a line.
What else do people ask about replacing text?
Can I replace a word in several PDFs at once?
No. Each document is edited in its own window, one line at a time.
Does replacing a word remove the old word from the file?
From the page, yes: Save writes the file again without the line you replaced. Copies elsewhere in the file, such as bookmarks, link addresses and the document’s properties, stay as they were. PDF Textfix is not a redaction tool.
Why does Find not find a word I can see?
The page may be a scanned image, which holds no text; the Lines pane then says “This page is a scanned image”. Text drawn as outlines or pictures cannot be found either.
Can I undo a replacement after saving?
While the document is open, Undo (⌘Z) steps back through applied edits. The saved file keeps no earlier version of the lines you replaced, so keep the original with Save As (⇧⌘S) if you may need it.
More short answers are on the FAQ page, and Can PDF Textfix change the font, size or color? covers the other half of what people ask for.
