Staying organized is paramount no matter which industry you are in. Understanding your files, documents and data will make you able to move from simply keeping your documents organized to being able to better organize your business around those sorted and cataloged documents. This type of organization can take many forms, such as knowing where your paper files are to how many words are in your PDF. Why would that be important you ask? That is because, for many people in different industries, there are word limits and minimums. While in traditional text editors this is as easy as looking at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, with PDFs this is a bit different.
It is important to know how to work with PDFs, but this is not the only thing with PDFs that you should be able to do. Being able to work with PDFs is an important part of work across almost all industries. This is because PDF files are common across all industries and platforms, so working with them is not an advantage but rather a must for business professionals and aspiring students alike. The rub is that to work with PDFs you will need a tool to work with them with. These tools are called PDF editors and they come with a multitude of their own tools such as the merge PDF tool and the OCR tool (more on that later). The most popular PDF editor is Adobe Acrobat but it is rather expensive and there are some other options that you could choose from.
 Another thing to consider when working with PDFs or more specifically trying to count the number of words in the PDF is that PDFs themselves are not actually text files. This is not a problem since PDFs are image files by nature, but what can you do if there is text that needs to be read? Should you count how many words there are yourself? No, of course not, there are tools to help with this, but the first thing you will need to do is make the PDF readable and editable.
How to Convert Parts of a Scanned PDF (with OCR)
It is not practically possible to count the words in a PDF when it is a non-readable file. To convert the file into a readable text, you will need an OCR or optical character recognition. Many PDF editors have this, but when selecting a PDF editor to use for working on a PDF, make sure that this tool is available. Once you have your PDF editor with an OCR tool and the PDF you need to count words on then the rest is simple. All you need to do is navigate to the tools bar (this can be in different places depending on the PDF editor that you are using). Then you can select the OCR tool and it will automatically begin scanning your file for words. After this, it will produce a series of text that is found within the document. This is a great tool, but again make sure your PDF editor has this tool.
While many people like Adobe Acrobat, it isn’t for everyone, but luckily there are many options when it comes to finding a PDF editor. One of the other great online PDF editors is Lumin PDF. Lumin PDF is an easy to use PDF editor that comes with an OCR tool so that a scanned PDF could be made into a readable file. In addition to this Lumin PDF offers many great tools that you can use after making the PDF readable, one of these is being able to fund the word count in your PDF. Besides Lumin PDF there are many other great online PDF editors that do similar things. Some of these are PDFfiller, PDFelement, and SmallPDF. These are all great PDF editors in their own right. Which one you should choose is more based on what you need than their own relative capabilities. But once you have one of these PDF editors, how can you actually find the word count in your PDF?
How to Search for PDF Text Online
Many of these PDF editors will have a measure feature that will do more than just count words but it can do this. So from the tools tab, you will see this option, and depending on the PDF editor, you will see an option to count the number of words in your readable PDF. Some PDF editors, no matter how good, do not have the ability to count words in a PDF file. If this is your situation there is one additional option that is available to you. Firstly, you should make sure that your PDF is readable via the OCR tool. From there you can simply right-click the document and select all when it comes to text. Next, you can copy these and simply paste them into a word file or a Google Docs file. Here you will be easily able to see the number of words that are in your PDF. Lastly, you can also just convert your file into a Word document using the convert PDF tool. Once you have the word count, you can simply change the document back into a PDF.
For people who work with documents regularly, being able to know the number of words in a document is important since many documents and tasks have word limits that need to be strictly adhered to. However, this is not the end in terms of understanding the document you are working on. With a PDF editor, you can count the words in the PDF, how large the file is, and many other things that are relevant to what you need the file for. This is why in order to efficiently work with documents, you will need to be able to work with PDFs such as Lumin PDF and others.