PDF Search Application

Upload your PDF documents and search through their content quickly. This tool helps you find specific words or topics in one or many PDF files without reading through everything.

Inspiration

It can be hard and time-consuming to look through many PDF files to find the information you need. We wanted to make it easier to search through PDFs, just like how you search on the internet.

What it does

This application lets you:

• Upload single PDFs or a whole folder of PDF documents.
• Search for any word or phrase across all uploaded files.
• See the search results with small text previews, and find where they are in the document.

How we built it

We used:

• A web page that lets you drag and drop files or choose them from your computer.
• A Python program that reads and pulls out the text from the PDFs.
• A search feature that quickly finds matches from all the files.

Challenges we ran into

• Some PDFs had images instead of real text, which made it harder to read them.
• Making sure the search worked well with big files or lots of documents.
• Keeping the app fast even when there are many PDFs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We got the search to work on multiple PDFs at once.
• The app is simple and easy to use.
• It gives clear results that help users find what they need quickly.

What we learned

• How to work with PDF files in code.
• How to make search results easier to understand.
• How to connect a website to a backend program that does the real work.

What's next

• Add support for scanned PDFs using OCR (optical character recognition).
• Allow users to highlight and save important parts.
• Make it work on mobile devices.
• Save past searches for later use.

Built With

• bolt
• typescript