PDF DocOfficeScanned PDF or Text PDF? How to Tell the Difference and What to Do
Two very different kinds of PDF
Not all PDFs are the same inside. A text PDF is created by a program such as Word, a browser or an accounting system, and it contains real, selectable characters. A scanned PDF is made by a scanner or phone camera, and each page is only a photograph of a sheet of paper.
From a distance they look the same. In practice they behave very differently when you search, copy text or convert them.
A thirty-second test
Open the PDF and try to select a word with your mouse. If the words highlight and you can copy them, it is a text PDF. If a whole block or the entire page is highlighted as one picture, or nothing highlights, it is a scan.
Another check is the search box. Press Ctrl+F and type a word you can see on the page. If nothing is found, the page is a picture.
Why it matters
Text PDFs can be searched, copied, converted to Word or Excel with good accuracy, and they are usually small. Scanned PDFs cannot be searched, cannot be converted directly, and are often large because they contain photographs of every page.
If you try to convert a scan to Word or Excel with a normal PDF converter, you will get empty or picture-only results.
How OCR turns a picture into text
Optical character recognition, or OCR, analyses the shapes in an image and works out which letters and digits they represent. After OCR, the text can be copied, edited and searched.
For best results, scan at 200 to 300 DPI, keep the page straight, use even lighting and avoid shadows. Accuracy falls with small print, handwriting and low contrast. Always proofread numbers and names.
What to do with each type
With a text PDF, use the normal tools: PDF to Word, PDF to Excel or Compress PDF. With a scan, first run OCR. Our Image to Excel or Word tool does this for JPG and PNG pictures: if your scan is a PDF, you can export the pages as images with PDF to JPG, and then convert them.
If the scan is large, compress it afterwards. Photographs of pages are heavy, and a smaller file is easier to email.
Related guides
- How to Convert an Image (JPG or PNG) into Excel or Word with OCR
- How to Convert a PDF to an Editable Word Document (DOCX)
- How to Compress a PDF and Reduce File Size Without Losing Readability