Edit a PDF, including the text that is already in it

What you can do

The toolbar, group by group, and the page controls in the thumbnails panel beside it.

Text

Click any line of text that is already in the document and retype it. Add a new text box anywhere, in any of the fonts we ship or the document’s own. Insert a symbol that is not on your keyboard. Find and replace across the whole document.

Links

Draw a rectangle over anything — a heading, a logo, a footnote reference — and give it an address, so it becomes clickable in the download.

Forms

Build fields: single-line text, multiline text, dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons and signature boxes. Fill in a form the document already has. Form Edit mode shows the tab order a person will move through. Publish for others to fill and sign gives you a link to send instead of a file.

Images

Place a picture and drag it to size, or click an image that is already on the page and delete it.

Signatures

Draw a signature with a mouse or a finger, type one, upload a photograph of one, or capture one with your camera. Or place an empty signature box for somebody else to sign.

Whiteout and annotations

Paint an opaque box over anything you want out of sight. Highlight, underline or strike through real text by dragging across it. Draw freehand, in ink or in highlighter.

Shapes and stamps

Rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows. A dated stamp carrying a subject and an author, in the colour and border style you pick. Files can be attached to the document as well.

Pages

From the thumbnails panel: rotate a page left or right, duplicate it, insert a blank page after it, delete it, add a page at the end, and drag pages into a different order.

While you work

Undo and redo without limit, zoom, nudge a selected object with the arrow keys, and a warning before you close a document with changes in it. Your unfinished edits are kept in this browser and offered back when you open the same file again.

How it works

1. Open a document. Drop a PDF onto the box, paste a web address, or start from a blank page at the size you choose. The file is uploaded so the server can find the text and the fields on each page; the pages you look at are drawn in your browser.
2. Edit it. Click a line of existing text to change it, or add text, images, links, form fields, signatures, shapes, stamps and annotations from the toolbar. Rotate, duplicate, insert, delete and reorder pages from the thumbnails. Nothing has been written to a file yet: your changes are a plan held in the browser, which is why undo goes all the way back.
3. Apply the changes and download. Apply sends the plan to the server, which writes a new PDF and hands you a download link. The document you uploaded is untouched — what you get is a new file.

What this editor will not do

• Whiteout is not redaction. It paints an opaque box on top; the words underneath stay in the file and can still be extracted by anything that reads the page rather than looks at it. To make text unrecoverable, delete it — click the line and clear it, which removes the original glyphs — or use a redaction tool that says that is what it does.
• A scan has no text to edit. A photographed or scanned page is one picture, so there is nothing to click on; even where a recognition layer has been added underneath, that text is invisible by design and is skipped. The OCR check will tell you which of your pages are pictures.
• A digitally signed document loses its signature. Applying changes writes a new file, and a signature covers the exact bytes of the one it was applied to. The editor warns you when the document you opened was signed.
• Some text cannot be edited, and the editor says why when you hover over it: text set at an angle, text drawn with a Type 3 font, and text whose embedded font is damaged. Those blocks can be covered or annotated but not retyped.
• An encrypted PDF is saved without its encryption, and a document claiming PDF/A conformance does not carry that claim into the edited copy. Both are stated in the editor before you apply.
• XFA forms — the dynamic kind built for Adobe LiveCycle — cannot have their fields edited here. The page content still can.
• It is not a word processor. Text does not reflow from page to page, paragraphs do not renumber themselves, and a heavily rewritten document is usually better rebuilt from its source than edited here.

What happens to your file

The PDF is uploaded when you open it, because the server is what finds the text, the images and the form fields on each page, and what writes the new file when you apply your changes. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the file you download for 24 hours, after which a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

While you are editing, the list of changes is stored in this browser so an accidentally closed tab does not cost you the work. The document itself is never stored locally, and nothing about the contents is logged. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

Can I edit the text that is already in the PDF?

Yes — click a line and type. The original glyphs are removed from the page rather than painted over, and the replacement is written in the document’s own embedded font whenever that font can draw the characters you typed. Where it cannot, the closest font we ship is used instead, and the result tells you where that happened.

Why does my edited line keep its typeface and stay where it was?

Because the edit is made in the page’s content stream, not on top of it. The instruction that drew the old glyphs is replaced by a positioning adjustment of exactly the same width, so anything later on the same line stays put, and the new text is drawn with the font the document already carries. That is the difference between an edit and a patch.

Is whiteout the same as redaction?

No, and treating it as though it were is how confidential material gets published. Whiteout draws an opaque rectangle over the content; the content is still in the file and comes straight out of any tool that extracts text. If something must be gone, delete the text itself, and check the result before you send it.

Can I edit a scanned document?

You can add things to it, sign it, white parts of it out and rearrange its pages, but there is no text in it to retype: a scan is a picture of words. Where a recognition layer has been added underneath the picture, that text is invisible and is deliberately skipped, because editing something the reader cannot see would move nothing on the page.

What are the free limits?

Documents up to 200 pages or 50 MB, and 3 applies an hour without an account. Opening a document, editing it and previewing your changes are not limited — the limit is on writing the new PDF.

Will the download look like what I saw on screen?

It is meant to, and the line breaks are the part worth explaining. The browser lays text out using the same advance widths the server will embed, so a line breaks on screen exactly where it breaks in the file, and where a font has to be substituted the same substitution happens on both sides.

Do I need an account?

No. Opening a document, editing it and downloading the result work without signing in; an account raises the hourly limit on applying changes and nothing else about the editor changes.

What happens if I close the tab by mistake?

Your changes are saved in this browser as you make them, and offered back when you open the same document again. Only the list of changes is kept locally — the PDF itself is not — so if the upload has already expired on our side you will be asked for the file again and your edits will be waiting.