# How do I tell whether a PDF has real text in it? — DocFind

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026. HTML version: https://docfindapp.com/answers/does-my-pdf-have-a-text-layer

**Try to select a word.** Open the PDF, drag across a line of text or long-press it on a phone. If individual words highlight, the file contains real text. If the whole page turns into one blue rectangle — or nothing happens at all — the page is an image, and no amount of searching will find a word that is not stored anywhere.

## Two more tests, when selection is ambiguous

- **Search for a word you can see.** Pick something unmistakable on screen and use the reader's find function. A text-layer PDF finds it; an image PDF reports nothing, which is the single most common "PDF search is broken" complaint. [The longer diagnosis.](https://docfindapp.com/answers/pdf-search-not-working)
- **Look at the file size per page.** A hundred text pages are often smaller than a handful of scanned ones. Megabytes per page is a strong hint that you are holding photographs.

## The confusing middle case

A PDF can be *partly* searchable, and this catches people out. A report typed on a computer with three scanned appendices bolted on has a text layer for some pages and none for the rest, so search works until it silently doesn't. The same happens when OCR has been run once, badly: some pages carry recognised words, others were skipped, and nothing on screen tells you which.

A scanned page that has been through OCR also keeps looking exactly like a photograph — because it still is one. The open-source OCRmyPDF project describes its whole job as adding text "layers" to the images in a PDF, "making scanned image PDFs searchable" ([*OCRmyPDF: Introduction*](https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html), read 23 September 2026): the picture stays, and the words sit with it where you cannot see them. That is why the selection test, not your eyes, is the one that answers the question.

## What to do with each answer

- **It has text** — copying and searching work now, in the reader you already have, at no cost.
- **It does not** — it needs OCR before any of that is possible. [How to run it, and where it runs matters](https://docfindapp.com/answers/make-a-scanned-pdf-searchable): an online converter only works once the document has been uploaded to it, which is a poor trade for anything confidential.

## Where DocFind fits

[DocFind](https://docfindapp.com/) answers this question for a whole library instead of one file at a time. It indexes your PDFs, reads scanned ones on the device — Vision on iPhone, a bundled ML Kit model on Android, both working in airplane mode — and then tells you what it could not do: which files were skipped and why, and which pages are not searchable yet. Matches that came from OCR are labelled as such, so you always know whether a result came from the file's own text or from recognition that might have misread a word.

Related: [What is OCR?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/what-is-ocr) · [Make a scanned PDF searchable](https://docfindapp.com/answers/make-a-scanned-pdf-searchable) · [PDF search not finding words?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/pdf-search-not-working) · [Extracting text from a PDF](https://docfindapp.com/answers/extract-text-from-a-pdf)