How do you search for a word or phrase in a pdf file?

I am trying to search for a word in a large PDF document that I got as an email attachment on my MacBook Pro. Can this be done?

You don't say what version of OSX you are running - but pretty much every version of preview can search a pdf file for a word or phrase. If you need to search multiple PDFs in a directory - it is best to go get Acrobat Reader from Adobe. It has a search function that can search multiple PDFs at once.
Adobe - Adobe Reader download - All versions

IbikeTrek said:

I am trying to search for a word in a large PDF document that I got as an email attachment on my MacBook Pro. Can this be done?

Click to expand...

Preview Edit Menu>Find>Find... then enter the word in the Search bar at top right hand corner.

Thanks for suggestion above. I am using Lion 10.7.4. The .PDF file I am trying to search is an attachment to an email. It looks like a scan of the paper document (many, many pages). I tried in Preview>Edit menu>Find>Find to look for a word that I saw that was on the first page and it warned "No Results Found". What am I not understanding here?

A scan of a PDF isn't necessarily searchable unless the person scanning used some kind of Optical Character Recognition. If you can select words on the page then you can probably search for the word. If it is just a scan/picture - then you are probably toast.

There are a few OCR PDF choices out there and they give varying results depending on the input source quality.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ocr+pdf&sugexp=chrome,mod=14&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Yeah, toast. Unaltered scans are not searchable, they're just images.