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Both Adobe Acrobat and Apple Preview ship built-in OCR that will convert a scanned PDF into a text-layer PDF countable by any of the three methods. Adobe Acrobat: recognize text in PDFs.
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How to count words in a PDF
Three ways that work, ranked by speed. The first is a browser-only tool that never uploads the file.
1. Drop it into the PDF page counter
Open the PDF page counter and drop the file. It reports the page count instantly and, for text-layer PDFs, the word count too. The file never leaves your browser.
2. Use Adobe Acrobat
Open the PDF in Acrobat. File › Properties › Description shows the page count. Acrobat Pro can export selected text to a text file, which you then paste into a word counter to get the total.
3. Copy the text into Word or Google Docs
If the PDF has a text layer, open it, select all, copy, and paste into Word or Google Docs. Word’s Review › Word Count and Docs’ Tools › Word count both give you the total. This is the least accurate method for PDFs with headers, footnotes, or captions, because copy behavior varies by viewer.
Scanned PDFs need OCR first
If the PDF is a scan (an image of pages, not real text), no counter can read the words until you run OCR. Adobe Acrobat’s Enhance Scan tool works. So does macOS Preview’s built-in text recognition. Once the text is real, use any of the three methods above.
Try the counter
The fastest way is the PDF page counter. Drop your file, get the count, done.