How do I search for a superscript in a PDF?

Hello @Reid5D25,

I hope you are doing well, and thanks for reaching out. We're sorry for the trouble you had.

Please note that Acrobat’s Find/Search tool doesn’t have a way to target “superscript” formatting specifically; it searches only the underlying text content, not formatting like superscript vs. normal text. If the file is a scanned document or image-based PDF, Acrobat cannot find any text at all. In such cases, the content is just an image, so the search won’t work. For this, open the PDF, go to All tools > Scan & OCR. Select Recognise Text > In this file. Run OCR to make the document searchable.

Also, note that: Superscripts can be stored as different Unicode characters (for example, “²” instead of “2”). Acrobat will only match the exact character stored in the file, not a visually similar one. Please check these articles for more information:

Searching in PDFs

Fix text issues in scanned PDFs

Recognize text in scanned documents

I hope this helps, and let us know how it goes.

Regards,

Anand Sri.