Find the repeated lines in a PDF

What it looks for

Lines that repeat

The same line on at least 3 pages, or on at least 30% of the pages, whichever is more. In a PDF of 2 or 3 pages, 2 pages are enough. Numbers may change from page to page, so “Page 1 of 4” and “Page 2 of 4” count as one line. Capitals and spacing are ignored.

At the edge, or in the body

A repeated line among the first two or last two lines of its pages, or in the top or bottom 8% of the page, is ticked to leave out. So are repeated lines just above or below it, within the top or bottom quarter of the page, so a footer of three lines goes whole. A line that repeats in the body of the page, such as a table heading, is listed but kept unless you tick it. So is a line whose numbers change from page to page without counting up with the pages, such as a subtotal or a chapter heading.

Page numbers

“Page 3”, “Page 3 of 10” and “p. 3” anywhere on a page. At the top or bottom of a page, also “- 3 -”, “3 / 10”, and a number on its own when it counts up with the pages, so a lone “42” in a table stays.

Pages with no text

A page with no text layer is blank, or more often a scan or a photo of a page. This tool can’t read text in pictures, and neither can Agnos: it skips those pages and names them in the file’s warnings.

What it can’t do

• It reads text-based PDFs only. There is no OCR, so a scanned page shows up as a page with no text.
• It reads each page from top to bottom, one line at a time. Text set in two columns comes out mixed, and a table comes out as rows of words.
• It doesn’t open password-protected PDFs.
• It doesn’t change your PDF. The copy button copies plain text.
• Some PDFs in Chinese, Japanese or Korean need font tables this page doesn’t load, and their text may come out missing.
• A long PDF takes a while. A file over 100 MB may be slow, or too big for the browser’s memory.

Your PDF stays on your computer

The file is opened with pdf.js, Mozilla’s open-source PDF reader, inside this page. It is read from your disk into your browser’s memory and is never sent anywhere: there is no upload and no account, and this site has no analytics. You can check: once the tool says it is ready, turn off your internet connection and try a file.