When you want to check out the word count of a document, everything will depend on which tool you currently use to visualize and edit PDF documents, is it Adobe Acrobat, Foxit PDF Editor, UPDF, or another PDF editor?
Some editors have this feature built-in, while others suggest you convert the PDF document to another type of document and then count the words. Let's check how we can count words on each of them!
Adobe Acrobat
Acrobat does not have a built-in word counter, which means you need to convert your PDF to a Word document and then use Microsoft Word to count the words of your document.
Drop your PDF document in the dropzone and wait for it to convert it to a Word document.
Once it is done, you will be able to download the document
Open the Word document and go to the Review tab
Under the Review tab, look for the Word Count button, click on it, and it will show you the document's word count.
Foxit PDF Editor
Unlike Adobe Acrobat, the Foxit PDF Editor makes our lives easier since there is no need to convert our PDF document to something else to count words.
To count words in a PDF document with Foxit PDF Editor, open the document, and with no text selected, click on View -> Word Count, which will show a pop-up with the Word Count of the PDF document.
Way easier, right?
UPDF
Like Adobe Acrobat, UPDF doesn't support counting words of a PDF document out-of-the-box as Foxit PDF Editor allows us.
To count the words with UPDF, we have to go through a similar process to what we do for Adobe Acrobat; check it out below:
Open the PDF document with UPDF
Click on File -> Export -> Word
Open the Word Document and go to the Review tab
Under the Review tab, look for the Word Count button, click on it, and it will show you the document's word count.
Conclusion
If you are using Adobe Acrobat or UPDF, it will require a bit more effort from you to count the words in a PDF document since they don't have such a feature built-in. Now, with no doubt that if you are already using Foxit PDF Editor as your default PDF editor, we both know that your life is going to be way easier when it comes to counting words in PDF documents.
Should I switch to Foxit PDF Editor to count words? If that is not going to be something that you will be doing frequently, I would suggest not doing so. Now, if you have to count words in PDF documents daily, switching to a PDF editor that has word count built-in could save you some time to do other things!
Word count: 476 words, 2516 characters by word counter