What happens
The PDF to Word Converter says no text could be extracted, or the PDF Word & Character Counter says no text could be counted, because the PDF has no text layer — although you can see text on its pages.
Why it happens
A PDF made from a scanner, a phone camera or a fax is a set of pictures of pages. The words you can see are part of the picture; there is no text in the file for a tool to read. Turning a picture of text back into text is called OCR — optical character recognition — and these tools do not attempt it, because its results vary too much to hand back as if they were the document.
To check: open the PDF and try to select a single word. If the selection is a box over the whole page, or nothing, the page is a scan.
What to do
Give the PDF a text layer with an OCR app first, then use the tool:
- Most scanner apps and some printers’ scanning software can save a “searchable PDF”.
- Adobe Acrobat and many other PDF editors have a recognise-text or OCR function.
- Google Drive runs OCR when you open a PDF with Google Docs. That uploads the document to Google, so think about what is in it first.