How Can I Tell Whether a PDF Is Scanned or Born-Digital?
Direct answer
Try selecting individual words. Selectable, cleanly scaling text suggests born-digital text or an OCR layer. A page that behaves like one large picture is likely a scan, although OCR can make a scan searchable too.
Why this happens
Born-digital PDFs are exported from applications and usually contain text objects, vectors, and fonts. Scanned PDFs normally contain one or more raster images representing each paper page.
An OCR process can place invisible text over a scan. That file is still visually image-based even though search and copy work, so compression can affect visible text quality without removing the OCR layer.
PDF inspectors can provide a more reliable answer by listing page images and fonts, but simple selection and zoom tests are useful first checks.
Quick tests
- Select one word rather than dragging a rectangle over the whole page.
- Zoom in and see whether letter edges stay perfectly smooth or become pixelated.
- Search for a known phrase and copy it into a text editor.
- Check whether every page has the same photographic background or shadow.
What BytesPDF does
BytesPDF reports embedded image counts after processing. Image-heavy scans usually present more compression opportunity than text-only PDFs.
Related answers and guides
Related privacy-sensitive scenarios
Scenario guides with destination checks for the document you are preparing.
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