PDF Word Counter
Choose a PDF and see its word count, characters with and without spaces, and a table with the numbers for each page. The file stays on your device.
Runs in your browser: nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Choose or drop a PDF.
- Read the totals at the top and the table with words and characters for each page.
How it works
The text of every page is read with pdf.js in your browser. Each page’s text is split on whitespace to count words, and its characters are counted by Unicode character, not by byte. The totals are the sums of the pages.
Example
A page that reads “Don’t stop – well-known facts.” has 4 words: Don’t, stop, well-known and facts. The lone dash is not counted. It has 30 characters with spaces and 26 without them.
Tips
- Cut headers, footers and the table of contents out first if you need the count of the body text only; use the Delete PDF pages tool for whole pages.
- Pages listed with 0 words are usually full-page images or blanks.
Frequently asked questions
How is a word counted?
Any piece of text between spaces or line breaks that holds at least one letter or digit is a word. So don't and well-known are one word each, and a lone dash or bullet is not counted.
Why is my count different from Word or Google Docs?
The PDF stores text in pieces placed on the page, and the order and line breaks are only reconstructed. A word hyphenated at the end of a line counts as two, and headers, footers and page numbers are counted too, so the number can differ a little from the original document.
What counts as a character?
Characters counts every letter, digit, punctuation mark and space, without line breaks. The other number leaves out all whitespace.
Why does a scanned PDF show nothing?
A scan holds pictures of pages, not text. This tool has no OCR (text recognition), so only PDFs with real text can be counted.
Does it work for other languages?
Yes for any script that separates words with spaces, such as English, Spanish or Russian. For Chinese or Japanese, which are written without spaces, the word count is not meaningful, use the character count.