PDF Word Count — Words, Characters, Pages
Drop a PDF and get its word count, character counts, and page count in one shot. Useful for translators quoting by the word, students checking a limit, and writers who exported to PDF and just want the number. It reads the text layer in your browser — the file is never uploaded.
Drop PDF files here or click to select
One or many · a count card per file
No PDF handy? Count sample-10-pages.pdf, or see what a scanned file does with the scanned sample. More free sample files.
What it counts
- Words — whitespace-separated tokens across the whole document.
- Characters (with spaces) — the full length, the figure most "max characters" limits mean.
- Characters (no spaces) — letters, digits and punctuation only.
- Pages — the document's page count, for per-page averages.
Why a PDF word count is tricky
A PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not neat sentences, so counts are extremely close but not always identical to what Word reported before export — hyphenation, soft line breaks, and text baked into images all nudge the number. For a born-digital PDF (exported from a word processor) the count is reliable. For a scanned PDF there's no text layer at all, so the count comes back as zero words; the tool flags that and points you to OCR, which adds a text layer you can then count.
How to count the words in a PDF
- Drop the PDF — or several at once; each gets its own card of totals.
- Click Count. Text is extracted page by page in your browser with pdf.js; nothing is uploaded.
- Read the totals — words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, pages and an estimated reading time.
- Open the per-page breakdown if you need to know which section is carrying the length, and export it as CSV for a report or an invoice.
- Watch for a zero. 0 words with pages present means the PDF is a scan with no text layer — run OCR first and count again.
FAQ
How do I count words in a PDF?
Drop the PDF into the tool above and click Count — words, characters and pages appear immediately, computed in your browser with no upload.
Why does my scanned PDF show 0 words?
A scan is a picture of text with no underlying text layer, so there's nothing to count. Run it through OCR first; that recognises the words and makes the file countable (and searchable).
Is the count exactly the same as Microsoft Word's?
Usually within a fraction of a percent, but not guaranteed identical — PDF export changes how spaces and line breaks are stored. Treat it as an accurate estimate rather than a legal word-for-word match.
Can I count several PDFs at once?
Yes — drop a batch and you get a separate count card for each file. The totals aren't summed; each file is reported on its own.
Related PDF tools
- Online PDF Viewer — Page-by-page browser viewer.
- PDF Inspector — Dump XMP, info-dict, fonts, page boxes.
- Search Inside PDFs — Full-text search across many PDFs.
- PDF Font Checker — Check embedding and extract the font files.
- Compare Two PDFs — Page-by-page visual pixel diff.
- PDF Text Diff — Added and removed lines between two files.