Ad Fontes

Search Modes

• Exact phrase Finds the exact words in order — best for doctrine names, author names, or known phrases. Default.
• All words Every word must appear somewhere in the book, not necessarily together — good when exact phrase returns too few results.
• Any word Any matching word qualifies — broadest results, useful for topic browsing.

Full-Text Search Tips

• Search by author: John Owen, Thomas Watson, Richard Baxter
• Search by doctrine: imputed righteousness, covenant of grace
• If you get too few results, switch to All words or shorten the phrase
• If you get too many, switch to Exact phrase or add more specific words
• Click See in context on any excerpt to read the full page and navigate surrounding pages

Verse Search

All formats are accepted and auto-normalized — Arabic and Roman numerals return identical results:

• Standard: John 3:16  |  Roman numerals: John iii.16
• Psalms: Ps 119:105  |  Puritan style: Ps. cxix.105
• Epistles: 1 Cor 13:13  |  1 Cor xiii.13
• Separators: colon, period, or space all work — 3:16, 3.16, 3 16
• Short forms: Jn, Mk, Lk, Mt, Rom, Rev, Heb, etc.
• Click any result to search that book in the full-text index

Known Limitations

• Most books are extracted directly from PDF text layers; scanned image-only PDFs have been processed with Tesseract — quality varies by scan resolution, and some pages may remain empty or garbled
• Verse search covers references cited in the text of each book, not necessarily the verse itself being quoted verbatim
• Very short abbreviations without a trailing letter may not parse (e.g. Joh. needs to be John or Jn)