What can I search?

Goodnotes makes it easy to find your notes with handwriting and text search. Here's what you can search:

• Handwriting created with the Pen Tool.

  <aside> ℹ️ The app can currently recognize handwriting in the following languages:

  • Chinese (China/Taiwan/Hong Kong)
  • Dutch
  • English (US/UK)
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese (PT/BR)
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Thai
  • Turkish </aside>

• Typed text created with the Text Tool.

• Text in imported PDFs.

  <aside> ℹ️ Only PDFs that include an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) layer are searchable. PDFs created digitally, for example from word processors, almost always include an OCR layer. PDFs created from physical documents or books through a PDF-scanning app might also have OCR performed on them and might be searchable. Goodnotes does not perform OCR on PDFs so your imported documents will need an existing OCR layer in order to be searchable.

  </aside>

• Text on pages scanned with the Scan Documents feature.

• Document outlines.

• Titles of folders and documents.

Search

Search the library

1. In the Library View, choose the Search icon near the top-right corner.
2. Do any of the following:
   • Type one or more space-separated keywords in the search box.
   • Choose one of the keywords under Recently Searched Keywords.
   • View a document under Recently Opened Documents.
   • Clear the history of keywords and opened documents via the corresponding Clear button.

The app will find content that matches any of the search keywords, and displays results in different subsections: Titles, Written Notes, PDFs, Document Outlines, Typed Notes.

Except for the Titles subsection, which show folders and documents with matching titles, each result is listed in one row, with the leftmost thumbnail representing the found document and the remaining thumbnails on the right representing its matching pages.

Work with global search results

• Open a matching page: Tap on the page thumbnail. This will open the document on that page with search mode active.

  

• View more matching pages of a found document: Scroll the row of the found document.

• View all results of a particular content type: Choose the Show All text right below the corresponding subsection, e.g. Show All PDFs.