There are two fundamentally different types of PDFs, and understanding the difference will save you frustration when trying to work with them.
Digital (Native) PDFs
These are PDFs created directly from software — exported from Word, Google Docs, InDesign, web browsers, or any application with a "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" option.
Characteristics: Text is selectable and searchable. You can copy and paste text. File sizes are typically smaller. Fonts are embedded or referenced. Converting to Word produces editable text.
Scanned PDFs
These are created by scanning physical documents with a scanner or phone camera. Each page is essentially a photograph stored inside a PDF container.
Characteristics: Text is NOT selectable — it's just pixels in an image. You cannot search within the document. File sizes are larger (each page is a full image). Converting to Word produces images, not editable text (unless OCR is used).
How to Tell Which Type You Have
Open the PDF and try to select text with your cursor. If you can highlight individual words and sentences, it's a digital PDF. If clicking and dragging selects the entire page as one block (or selects nothing), it's a scanned PDF.
Impact on PDF Tools
Compression: Scanned PDFs compress dramatically (50-90%) since they're image-heavy. Digital PDFs compress less (10-30%) since text is already compact.
PDF to Word: Digital PDFs produce excellent editable Word documents with FreePDFNest's Editable Text mode. Scanned PDFs should use Exact Layout mode instead, since there's no real text to extract.
Merge, Split, Rotate, Protect: Both types work identically with these tools since they operate on pages as units.
Making Scanned PDFs Searchable
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology can analyze the images in a scanned PDF and add an invisible text layer, making the document searchable while preserving the original appearance. This is a feature we're working on bringing to FreePDFNest in the future.
Ready to try it?
Use our free PDF to Word tool — no signup required.