Searching for a string in a pdf files

Question

I am working on a school project that has several pdf files. There should be a search by name functionality that I just type in the student\'s name and all the pdf files wit

Answer 1

PDF is a very complex specification and it is possible to create so many variants that it is impossible to parse reliably unless you use the same tools to read it as were used to create it (and often not even then). There are several tools which flatten PDF to a text string (e.g. pdf2text) and it may be possible to search these but it's unreliable.

Many PDF tools only implement some of the spec. Some people suggest that the best way to search PDF is to reduce it to an image and then OCR that.