About PDF character counter
Characters, not words, are the billing unit in translation, subtitling and typesetting, and they are the hard limit in filings that cap a brief at so many characters. This tool reports four numbers for the same document: characters including spaces, characters excluding spaces, characters excluding all whitespace including line breaks, and a count of non-printing or control characters that slipped in. The distinction matters because a translation agency quoting per 1,000 characters usually means with spaces, while a court length limit usually means without. Counting happens on Unicode code points after normalisation, so an accented character composed of a base letter plus a combining mark is counted once rather than twice — the difference can swing a total by several per cent in French or Vietnamese text. Ligatures such as "fi" drawn as a single glyph are expanded back to two characters, because that is what a human counting the page would say.
How to PDF character counter
- 01
Load the document
Drop the PDF in. The text layer is read locally.
- 02
Choose your number
Read the with-spaces, without-spaces or no-whitespace figure depending on whose rule you are working to.
- 03
Check the per-page table
Useful when a single page has to fit a character cap rather than the whole file.
- 04
Save the report
Download it as evidence for a quote or a filing.
What this tool does
- Four totals: with spaces, without spaces, without any whitespace, and control characters
- Unicode normalisation so composed accents count as one character, not two
- Ligatures expanded to their component letters before counting
- Per-page character table for page-level limits
- No upload, so confidential filings and client copy stay on your machine
Limitations worth knowing
Every PDF tool has constraints. Stating them plainly is more useful than discovering them halfway through your work.
- Image-only scans yield a zero count; OCR the file first if it is a scan.
- Soft hyphens inserted by justification are counted as characters because they exist in the text layer.
- CJK text is counted per character, which is correct for those scripts but not comparable with Latin word-based quotes.
How your file is handled
This tool runs entirely inside this browser tab. When you choose a file, your browser reads it from your own disk and hands the bytes to JavaScript running on this page — no network request carries your document anywhere. You can confirm that yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and run the tool. You will see no upload.
Nothing is stored after the fact. Closing or reloading this tab discards the file, the result and everything derived from them, because none of it ever left your machine. Read how local processing works.
Questions about PDF character counter
Which figure do translation agencies use?
Most quote per 1,000 characters including spaces, but it is worth confirming — the gap between with and without spaces is typically 15 to 18 per cent of the total.
Why is your count slightly lower than my editor's?
Usually accent handling. An editor counting raw code points scores "é" as two characters when it is stored decomposed; we normalise first so it counts as one.
Are line breaks characters?
They are included in the with-spaces figure and excluded from the no-whitespace figure, which is why we report both rather than making you guess.
Tools that pair with this one
- PDF Word CounterA real word count for a PDF, with the counting rule stated up front.
- PDF Line CounterLine counts derived from geometry, since a PDF has no newlines to count.
- PDF Text StatisticsOne report that describes how a document is written, not just how long it is.
- Extract Text from PDFLift the text layer out of a PDF and keep it in reading order.
- PDF to TextRecover the words from a PDF — read out of its text layer, not guessed.
- PDF Text ExtractorOne-pass extraction when you just need the words, fast.