Free tool
Is this PDF scanned, or does it have real text?
Find out in seconds, page by page. Scanned pages look fine on screen but are invisible to search, copy-paste and AI tools. Your file never leaves your browser.
Runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded
Drag & drop a PDF, or
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What this checks
Every PDF page is either drawn from text (letters the file knows are letters) or from an image of text. This tool asks pdf.js, the PDF engine inside Firefox, for each page's text layer and counts the characters on it.
- Text — 40 or more characters of selectable text on the page. Search, copy and AI tools can read it.
- Scanned — fewer than 40 characters. The page is almost certainly an image: a scan, a fax, a phone photo or a “print to image” export.
- Mixed — the document is mostly text but some pages are scans. Those pages need OCR on their own.
It's the same rule ClientSafeAI Document Processing uses to price an upload, so the price shown here is the price you'd be quoted there.
How to split a large PDF
Scanned PDFs over 300 pages need splitting before OCR. Nothing needs installing for this:
- Mac (Preview) — open the PDF, show thumbnails, select a range of pages and drag them to the desktop. Each drag becomes its own PDF.
- Windows or Mac (Chrome) — open the PDF in Chrome, press Print, choose “Save as PDF” and set custom pages (for example 1-250). Repeat for the next range.
- Adobe Acrobat — Organize Pages, then Split, and split by page count.
Questions
Scanned PDFs, answered
Try to select a sentence with your cursor. If you can’t, or the whole page highlights as one block, the page is an image — a scan, fax or photo — with no text layer. This checker does the same test on every page at once, and counts how much selectable text each page really has.
A scanned page is a picture of text. Search, copy-paste, screen readers, e-discovery tools and AI assistants all see it as blank until it has been through OCR (optical character recognition). A PDF can look perfect on screen and still be unsearchable.
No. The PDF is opened by pdf.js inside your browser tab. There’s no upload, and the page makes no network request carrying the file. You can check it yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a check.
Some pages have text and some are scans — common when an exhibit or a signed page was scanned into an otherwise typed document. Text extraction only reads the text layer, so the scanned pages come out empty unless they are OCR’d. ClientSafeAI prices a mixed PDF as a scan: the typed pages keep their text as it is and only the scanned pages go through OCR.
Run it through OCR. Adobe Acrobat Pro and some scanners do it locally. If you’d rather not install anything, ClientSafeAI reads scans with OCR on its own server — never an outside OCR service — for $4.99 up to 300 pages, and deletes the file within minutes of delivery.