Whether you can copy text out of a PDF depends entirely on how it was made, and it is worth thirty seconds to find out before you start retyping anything.
A PDF exported from a word processor contains the actual characters. They can be searched, selected, copied and pulled out in full, with formatting stripped, in a second or two.
A PDF produced by a scanner or a phone camera contains photographs of pages. To a computer there is no text there at all, just an image that happens to look like writing to you. Searching it finds nothing and selecting gives you nothing, which is why people think their reader is broken.
Turning the second kind into the first requires optical character recognition, which reads the shapes and guesses the letters. It is genuinely useful and genuinely imperfect, especially with handwriting, poor scans and unusual layouts. We do not offer it today. If your document is short, retyping the part you need is often faster than fixing what an OCR pass gets wrong.
Try to select a line of text. If it highlights word by word, there is real text. If nothing happens, it is an image.
Not at the moment. We would rather tell you plainly than have you upload a document and find out.
No. It is read inside your browser.