PDF documents are widely used in reports, contracts, textbooks, and exams. Often, we need to search for specific text and highlight it —for example, marking key terms in reports, highlighting important clauses in contracts, or extracting certain content for analysis. Manual processing is time-consuming and prone to errors, so automating text search and highlighting in PDFs is essential.

In this guide, we’ll demonstrate four practical ways to find and highlight text in PDF files using Java :

Highlight text on a single page

Highlight text within a specific rectangular area

Highlight text throughout the entire document

Highlight text using regular expressions

Installing the Required Library

We use Spire.PDF for Java , a powerful PDF processing library that allows you to load PDFs, search text, edit content, and highlight text.…