Is your PDF a real document or a picture? How to check in five seconds

This one distinction explains most PDF frustration. Two files can look identical while behaving completely differently, and knowing which you have saves you from trying the wrong tool.

The test

Open the PDF and try to select a line of text by dragging across it. A neat highlight over the words means real text. A rectangle over the whole page, or nothing at all, means it is an image. Pressing Ctrl+F and searching for a word you can plainly see is an equally quick check.

Why it matters

• Converting. PDF to Word produces an empty document from a scan, because there is nothing to extract. You need the OCR version instead.
• Searching. Your computer cannot index a scanned archive, so finding a specific bill means opening files one by one.
• File size. Scans are much larger, since each page is a photograph rather than a few kilobytes of text.
• Accessibility. Screen readers cannot read a picture of text at all.

What to do with a scan

If you want the words, use Scanned PDF to Text. If you want the document to stay as it looks but become searchable, use Make PDF Searchable, which adds an invisible text layer behind the image.

One nuance: a PDF can be partly both. A report might have typed pages and a scanned signature page. OCR on the whole file handles the mixture correctly, leaving existing text alone.