Providing the ability to search a document for content recorded as both ink characters and text characters. A character from a search query word is retrieved. A program retrieves the character in the electronic document. The program determines if the character in the electronic document is an ink or text character. For text characters, the character in the document content is compared to a character in the search query word to determine if the characters match. For ink characters, an ink alternate term is obtained. A character in the ink alternate is compared to the character of the search query word to determine if the characters match. Once all characters in the ink alternate word are compared, another ink alternate word is retrieved and compared to the search query word.