The Two Architectures of PDF Files
While both appear as .pdf documents on your computer, Native Digital PDFs and Scanned PDFs are engineered with fundamentally different internal structures.
1. Native Digital PDFs (Vector & Text Streams)
Created when saving directly from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Excel, or design software. Text is stored as character glyph codes mapped to embedded TrueType/OpenType font dictionaries.
- Selectable & Searchable: You can highlight text, copy to clipboard, and search with Ctrl+F.
- Tiny File Footprint: A 10-page text document can occupy less than 80 KB.
- Lossless Vector Scaling: Fonts and shapes remain infinitely sharp at any zoom level.
2. Scanned PDFs (Raster Image Containers)
Created when scanning physical paper through a flatbed scanner or photographing documents with a mobile app. The PDF file is essentially a container wrapping high-resolution full-page JPEG/TIFF raster images.
- Non-Selectable: Text cannot be highlighted without running Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
- Heavy File Size: A 10-page scan can easily weigh 15 MB to 40 MB at 300 DPI.
- Pixelation on Zoom: Zooming in reveals scanner noise, dots, and raster blur.
How One Resizer Handles PDF Conversions
When using One Resizer's PDF to Word or PDF to Text tools, native digital PDFs extract clean editable typography instantly in the browser. For scanned PDFs, our PDF Compressor downsamples embedded raster image streams from 300 DPI to 150 DPI to reduce megabyte bloat by up to 80%.