Diagnosis
Inspect a PDF
Run this first when a PDF is misbehaving. Most PDF problems are really one of four questions, and this answers all of them at once.
Report
The four questions worth asking
Is it a scan? This checks the first few pages for a real text layer. No text means it is images of pages, which explains why it is large, why you cannot search it, and why extracting text will not work.
Are the pages consistent? Mixed page sizes are why a document prints badly. The report groups pages by size so a stray letter-sized sheet in an A4 document is obvious. Resize to A4 fixes it.
Where is the weight? Bytes per page is a crude but effective signal. Under about 50 KB a page is a text document. Several hundred kilobytes a page means images, and compressing to a target will help.
Is it protected? An encrypted document cannot be opened by any tool on this site, and knowing that immediately saves you trying six of them.
Common questions
Why does it only check some pages for text?
Because checking every page of a long document means loading every page. The first five are a reliable sample; a document with text on page 40 and none on pages 1 to 5 is vanishingly rare.
Can it tell me which fonts are embedded?
Not currently. Font enumeration needs to walk each page's resource dictionary, which is more work than this quick report is meant to do.
Other PDF tools