Find Text & Recognize Text (OCR)

Find Text & Recognize Text (OCR)

LocusBIM has two complementary text features for PDFs: Find Bar (Ctrl+F) for cross-page text search, and Recognize Text (OCR) for extracting searchable text from scanned or image-only drawings.

Find Bar — Ctrl+F

Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on macOS) anywhere in the PDF view to open the Find Bar. Type your query — search runs as you type and scans every page of the document. The counter shows "X of Y" matches; while a long document is still being scanned it shows "Scanning N/M…" so you know it isn't stuck.

Matches are highlighted in yellow on the current page, with the active match in orange. Navigating to a match on a different page automatically switches to that page. Matches from native PDF text and OCR'd text are merged transparently — no separate search modes.

The Find Bar is a real toolbar: drag it anywhere on screen, toggle it from View → Find Bar, and its position persists across sessions like every other dockable toolbar.

Recognize Text (OCR) — for scanned PDFs

When a PDF page is image-only (a scanned drawing, photo of a redline, or a vector PDF with the text layer stripped), pdfium has nothing to give Find Bar and text selection doesn't work. LocusBIM detects this on doc-open and shows a yellow "This page is a scan" banner above the page.

Click Run OCR in the banner — or open the OCR dialog from the Document toolbar → Recognize Text (OCR) button. The dialog offers two choices:

1. Current page — fast (~5–10 s on a typical sheet) for testing
2. All pages — runs sequentially with a live progress bar showing "page N of M (recognizing text, X%)"

Recognised text is saved to the local database so reopening the document doesn't re-incur the OCR cost. Once a page is OCR'd, its banner disappears, text becomes selectable, and Find Bar finds matches in it.

Language Support — English + French

LocusBIM ships with bundled OCR language packs for English and French. The OCR dialog has a language picker that defaults to English; pick Français for drawings whose annotations are in French (common on Quebec projects + dual-language federal work). Both languages run on the same Tesseract.js engine; there is no quality or speed difference between them.

Plan availability

Find Bar and Recognize Text (OCR) are both included in every paid plan. During the 30-day trial they're available too — the only trial restriction is export.

Automatic OCR on open (optional)

In Preferences → General, enable "Run Recognize Text automatically on scanned PDFs" to skip the manual step entirely. When LocusBIM detects an image-only document, OCR starts in the background across every page. Disabled by default — the same default as Adobe Acrobat.