Use PhantomPDF to Navigate PDFs With Keyboard Shortcuts

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Whether or not you work regularly with PDFs, it’s always good to know a few keyboard shortcuts. Once you become familiar with these helpful little tricks on Foxit PhantomPDF, they’ll speed up your PDF workflow. And who doesn’t like increased efficiency? Following are some document navigation helpers.

Search for documents easily

You’ll often find yourself with a screen full of open documents that you need to skip between, whether you’re comparing information or copying it from one file to another. You can search for documents easily by switching between them.

Just hit Control + Tab on your keyboard. Doing so will bring you to the next tab.

Hitting Control + Shift + Tab will bring you back to the previous tab.

Keyboard Shortcuts - 1

Search within a document

Once you’ve found the document you’ll be working in, you can use the Page Up and Page Down buttons on your keyboard to jump through your document screen by screen. That way you won’t miss information the way you might by scrolling in the sidebar, especially on bigger documents.

If you need to find a certain page, hit Control + Page Up or Control + Page Down to jump from one page header to the next.

And if you already know which page you’re looking for, you can use Control + G. PhantomPDF will then highlight the Jump To Page input field. Type in your desired page number and hit enter.

Keyboard Shortcuts - 2

Zoom in and out

Now that you found the page you’re looking for, zoom in and out by holding down Control and using your mouse wheel or two fingers on your touch pad. PhantomPDF will zoom into the spot where your cursor is sitting. That way, you’ll never have to change tools.

Scroll horizontally

You know how to scroll vertically using your mouse wheel. Did you know that holding down Shift while using your mouse wheel lets you scroll horizontally?

Document search

We all know that Control + F brings up the basic document search functionality. When hitting Control + F, the search field will be automatically highlighted. Simply start typing and hit Enter to search the current document.

Additionally, you can click the gear wheel next to the search field and apply a couple of settings to the search function. That tells PhantomPDF not only to search in the document itself, but also to look through bookmarks and comments.

Keyboard Shortcuts - 3

What you probably didn’t know is that when you hit Control + Shift + F, PhantomPDF brings up an advanced search pane. Here you can choose between searching within the document that’s currently open or searching an entire folder. PhantomPDF will then search through all the PDFs in that folder.

Sound easy? That’s because it is! Try out these keyboard shortcuts and be amazed at how much faster you can navigate PDFs. For more about keyboard shortcuts, visit the PhantomPDF User Manual, starting on page 417.

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