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 PDF here
or choose it from your files
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Before you start
- Run it before OCR — it tells you which pages are only pictures of text.
- Pages whose text copies out as gibberish are flagged too; OCR fixes those as well.
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
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.
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.
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 recognized document is still worth the minute it takes.