# Can you get a word count for a PDF? — DocFind Last reviewed: October 10, 2026. HTML version: https://docfindapp.com/answers/word-count-in-a-pdf **Not directly. Adobe's own article on the subject begins "Currently, users cannot directly count words in a PDF doc", and the Apple Preview page on copying PDF text mentions no counter either. The way to a number is to get the text into a word processor, Microsoft Word or Apple's Pages, and read the count there.** That works when the PDF holds real text. A scanned PDF holds pictures of pages, and there is nothing to count until it has been through OCR. ## What Adobe suggests

Adobe's article sends you to its online PDF to Word converter: you "select a document to upload from your device", wait for the Word file, then "navigate to the ‘Review’ tab, then click 'Word count’". For phones, its FAQ answer is to "copy the PDF text to the mobile version of Microsoft Word to view the word count" ([*Counting Words in a PDF Document*, Adobe Acrobat](https://www.adobe.com/au/acrobat/roc/blog/how-to-count-words-pdf.html), read 10 October 2026). Note the word upload: the online route sends your document to Adobe's service. For a lecture handout that hardly matters; for a contract or a medical letter, the offline routes below keep the file on your own machine.

## In Word on a computer

Desktop Word opens a PDF itself. Microsoft says that when you do, "Word makes a copy of the PDF, converting it to a Word document", and "You always have the original PDF file" ([*Opening PDFs in Word*, Microsoft Support](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/word/opening-pdfs-in-word), read 10 October 2026). Then look down: Microsoft's word-count page says "When you need to know how many words, pages, characters, paragraphs, or lines are in a document, check the status bar", and "For a partial word count, select the words you want to count" ([*Show word count*, Microsoft Support](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/show-word-count-3c9e6a11-a04d-43b4-977c-563a0e0d5da3), read 10 October 2026).

The catch is in the PDF page. Conversion "works best with files that are mostly text", and "If the PDF contains mostly charts or other graphics, the whole page might show up as an image. When that happens, the text can’t be edited" (the *Opening PDFs in Word* page above). Text that comes through as an image is text Word cannot count either, so a total that looks low is worth a second look.

## On a Mac or iPhone without Word

Copy the text out and paste it into Pages. In Preview on a Mac, Apple's steps are "Choose Tools > Text Selection, drag over the text, then choose Edit > Copy" ([*Select and copy text in a PDF in Preview on Mac*, Preview User Guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/select-and-copy-text-in-a-pdf-prvw1020/mac), read 10 October 2026). That page says nothing about counting words, and we found no Preview control for it. In Pages on a Mac, click the View button in the toolbar, "then choose Show Word Count"; to count one passage, "select the text that you want to check — the count updates to reflect only the selected text" ([*Show word count and other statistics in Pages on Mac*, Pages User Guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/pages/show-word-count-and-other-statistics-tand47165437/mac), read 10 October 2026). On iPhone the same counter sits under View Options: "tap View Options, then tap Show Word Count" ([*Show word count and other statistics in Pages on iPhone*, Pages User Guide for iPhone](https://support.apple.com/guide/pages-iphone/tand47165437/ios), read 10 October 2026). Getting the text off a PDF on the phone first is covered in [copying text from a PDF on iPhone](https://docfindapp.com/answers/copy-text-from-pdf-on-iphone).

## Why two tools give two numbers

This part is our experience, not a vendor's statement. A PDF stores text as it sits on the page, so running headers, footers and page numbers repeat on every page and land in the copy, and a word split by a hyphen at the end of a line can be counted as two. Treat the result as an estimate. If you need the count of the body text only, select just that text before you read the counter, which both Word and Pages support.

## When there is nothing to count

If you cannot select a single word in the PDF, the pages are images and every method above returns zero or nearly zero. The text has to be recognised first; [checking for a text layer](https://docfindapp.com/answers/does-my-pdf-have-a-text-layer) tells you which case you have, and [extracting text from a PDF](https://docfindapp.com/answers/extract-text-from-a-pdf) covers getting the words out once it does.

Related: [Extract text from a PDF](https://docfindapp.com/answers/extract-text-from-a-pdf) · [Copy text from a PDF on iPhone](https://docfindapp.com/answers/copy-text-from-pdf-on-iphone) · [Does my PDF have a text layer?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/does-my-pdf-have-a-text-layer) · [Apply OCR in Microsoft Word](https://docfindapp.com/answers/apply-ocr-in-word)