Is my PDF scanned?
Find out whether a PDF has real text or is just a picture of one — before you run OCR.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
- 1
Add your file
Add the PDF you are about to send somewhere it will be read by a machine — a job application, an automated intake, a system that indexes documents.
- 2
Set it up the way you want
Nothing to configure. The document is examined for a real text layer, and the report distinguishes pages that have text from pages that are only pictures.
- 3
Download the result
Read the result. If it reports no text, the file is an image and anything that tries to read it — a search index, a CV parser — will find nothing at all.
Questions about Is my PDF scanned?
- Why does this matter for a job application?
- Because an applicant tracking system reads the text, not the picture. A CV exported as an image looks perfect to you and completely empty to the parser, and the application is rejected without a person ever seeing it. This is the single most damaging thing you can get wrong.
- It says some pages have text and some do not.
- That is common in a document assembled from different sources — a typed cover page with scanned pages behind it. Run OCR to give the scanned pages a text layer too, and the whole document becomes readable.
- Does it tell me if the text is any good?
- It tells you whether text exists and roughly how much. Whether the words are correct is a different question — OCR output can be present and still be wrong, which is why proofreading a recognised document is still worth the minute it takes.