Edit PDF

What you can do

• Edit text: click a line of text in the PDF to change it or delete it.
• Move: drag a line of text, a logo, a picture or a shape of the PDF to a new place. Text keeps its own font, size and colour, and pictures keep their full quality.
• Add text: click anywhere and type. Choose a sans-serif, serif or monospace font, the size, bold, italic and colour.
• White-out: drag a box over anything you want to hide, such as a wrong date or an old address. The box is white unless you pick another colour.
• Highlight: drag across text to mark it, as with a highlighter pen.
• Draw: write or sign with your mouse, finger or stylus.
• Picture: add a logo, a stamp or a photo of your signature, then drag it into place and resize it.

Every edit can be selected, moved, styled again or deleted, and Undo and Redo work for all of them. Nothing changes in your file until you save, and even then you download a new copy.

How changing existing text works

A PDF is not a word-processor file. Its text is placed letter by letter at fixed positions, often with a font that is only partly stored in the file, so it cannot be retyped in place the way a Word document can. Edit text therefore covers the line you click with a patch in the colour of the page behind it, and puts your new text on the same line, with the same size and colour and the closest standard font: Helvetica for sans-serif fonts, Times for serif fonts and Courier for monospace fonts. For most documents, such as letters, bills and certificates made on a computer, the result looks the same as a real correction. A line in an unusual font will look slightly different.

Moving a line works differently: the line is drawn again at its new place from the PDF's own text, so it keeps its exact font and stays selectable. Only that line's letters move, not pictures, boxes or other text, and the old place is covered in colours taken from the page around it. When that cannot be done safely, the line is saved as a sharp picture of what you see instead (about 290 dots per inch), and you are told. That happens when part of the line is covered, when other text sits under it, on searchable scans, and for text filled with a gradient or picture. A line that is completely hidden cannot be picked up at all, so covered words never come back.

Moving pictures, logos and shapes

Press on a logo, a photo, a stamp or a drawn shape with Move and drag it where you want it. Pieces drawn on top of each other, such as the parts of a logo, move together. The picture itself is moved inside the PDF, not copied: it keeps its full quality, and its old place shows whatever was behind it, such as a coloured band or a gradient, with no patch. Text on a picture stays where it is, so move it as well. Backgrounds that fill the page or run from edge to edge are left alone, and a picture that is hidden or mostly covered by something else cannot be picked up.

Scanned PDFs are photos of paper: the whole page is one picture, so the words on it cannot be moved one by one. Unless they were made searchable (OCR), they contain no text to click or drag; use White-out and Add text on them instead.

Text in Hindi and other scripts

The standard PDF fonts cover English and other Western European languages. Text containing characters they do not have, such as ₹, Hindi or Tamil letters, or emoji, is saved as a sharp picture of the text (about 300 dots per inch). It looks the same, but it cannot be selected, copied or searched. The settings panel tells you when this applies.

What stays the same

Your edits are added on top of each page. Apart from pictures and shapes you move, the original text, images, links, bookmarks and form fields are not re-drawn, so they keep their quality, and the file usually grows only a little. Large pictures make it grow more.

Privacy

Your PDF is opened, edited and saved by JavaScript on your own device. It is not uploaded to a server, and nothing is kept after you close the page.