If you cannot highlight or copy text in a PDF, you are looking at an image masquerading as a document. This usually happens when a physical piece of paper is run through a hardware scanner.

Basic Text Extraction

Digital PDFs (like those exported straight from MS Word) have an invisible "text layer". Extracting text from these files is instant and 100% accurate because the computer already knows exactly what characters are on the page. You can use our 'PDF to Text' tool for this.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

If there is no text layer, the computer literally has to "look" at the pixels and guess what shapes look like letters. This requires complex Artificial Intelligence known as OCR. Fortunately, LovePDFs includes a powerful client-side OCR tool that can read scanned documents in over 100 languages directly in your browser.