Edit PDF

How to use Edit PDF

1. 1Pick a PDF, or drag it onto the box above.
2. 2Choose what you want to add, then set it up: the words to write, the colour, the thickness of the pen.
3. 3Click or drag on the page to place it. Use the strip on the left to move between pages.
4. 4Save when you are done. Undo and redo are there the whole way.

What gets added, and what is left alone

Everything this tool does is additive. Text, a picture, a highlight, an underline, a box, an oval, a line, an arrow, a freehand stroke, a sticky note: each one becomes new content sitting on top of the page you already had. The original page is written back underneath it untouched.

That also describes the thing it cannot do. It will not retype a sentence inside an existing paragraph, correct a figure in a table or change the font of a heading. Text in a PDF is not a document in the word-processor sense. It is a set of glyphs placed at fixed coordinates with the font and spacing baked in, and there are no paragraphs to reflow. Anything in a browser claiming to edit that text directly is either rasterising your page and typing over the picture, or guessing where the lines should fall and moving them.

So if your aim is to correct a typo in the body text, the honest answer is to fix it in whatever produced the PDF and export again. If your aim is to fill in, mark up, sign or comment on a finished document, that is what this page is for.

Signing with your own hand

Pick the draw tool, set a thickness of about two or three points, and drag your signature onto the page. Each drag is one stroke, so a signature with a crossed t or a dotted i takes a few. On a phone or a tablet your finger works better than a mouse ever does.

The other way is a photograph. Sign a sheet of white paper, photograph it, and place the image where it belongs. JPEG and PNG both work, and the picture keeps its proportions inside whatever box you drag for it.

Worth being exact about what that produces. It is a drawing of your signature on a page, which is what most order forms, consent slips and internal approvals are asking for. It is not a digital signature in the technical sense: no certificate, no identity check, no seal that software can test to prove the file was not altered afterwards. If somebody has asked you for a digitally signed PDF, or for a certificate-based signature, this page cannot produce one and will not pretend to. Whether a drawn signature is enough for your particular document is a question for whoever is asking for it.

The fonts, and the characters they can write

Text is written in one of the fonts every PDF reader already has: Helvetica, Times or Courier, each in regular, bold, italic and bold italic. Nothing is embedded, so adding a paragraph costs a few hundred bytes rather than the size of a typeface, and the file opens the same way everywhere.

Those fonts are encoded for Western European languages and stop there. Accented letters are fine, so are curly quotes, dashes and the euro sign. Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji are not, because the encoding has no slot for them. Type one and the tool names the character and declines to place the text, which is better than a file full of empty boxes or an error at the moment you press save.

A sticky note has no such restriction. Its words are stored in the file as text for the reader to display in its own interface, rather than drawn as glyphs on the page, so a note can say anything in any script.

Sticky notes behave like comments

A note is a real annotation, the same kind of object a reader's own comment tool creates. On the page it is a small marker, and the words appear when somebody opens or hovers it.

Readers treat annotations differently from each other. Some show the marker immediately, some gather notes into a comments panel, some hide them until you turn comments on, and printing leaves them out altogether. A note is the right choice for a message to a colleague who will read the file on screen, and the wrong choice for anything that has to be visible on paper. For that, use the text tool so the words are drawn on the page itself.

Why your pages keep their text

Nothing is rebuilt or flattened. The existing content of each page is kept as it is and your additions are appended to it, which means the text in the document stays selectable, searchable and readable by a screen reader, and the file grows by roughly what you added rather than by the weight of a picture of every page.

The document properties are left alone too. Title, author, creation date and the name of the software that made the original all survive, because an editor that quietly stripped them would lose information the owner of the file meant to keep. The metadata editor on this site is the place to change those on purpose.

One consequence follows from all this, and it matters. Each thing you add is a separate piece of page content, so somebody with a PDF editor can select it and delete it again. A filled box over a line of text hides that line from view while leaving every word of it in the file, where a search or a copy and paste brings it straight back. If the point is to get rid of information rather than to mark it, Redact PDF is the tool: it rebuilds the pages you mark from pixels and then checks the result.

What the summary after saving tells you

Once the file is written it is opened again and the text you added is read back out of it, line by line, and the count is reported. That confirms the words really are in the finished document and that a reader can extract them. It says nothing about whether they are in the right place, so look at the file before sending it.

The document is opened, edited, saved and checked in your browser. There is no upload and no copy on a server, which is the only arrangement that makes sense for a contract you are about to sign or a form with your address on it.

Limits

• 100 MB per file.
• It adds content to pages. It cannot change the text that is already in the document.
• Helvetica, Times and Courier only, in Western European characters. No fonts are embedded.
• Interactive form fields are not filled in. Text is written on top of the page instead.
• A filled box hides what is underneath without removing it from the file.
• A drawn signature carries no certificate and cannot be verified by software.
• Sticky notes do not print, and some readers keep them hidden.
• Anything you add can be selected and deleted again in another PDF editor.
• Password-protected PDFs have to be unlocked first.

Frequently asked questions

Can I change the words that are already in my PDF?

No, and no browser tool can do it reliably. The text in a PDF is a set of glyphs at fixed positions with the font and spacing already decided, so there is no paragraph to retype. This tool adds text, pictures and marks on top of the page. For a correction to the body text, edit the original document and export a new PDF.

Is a signature I draw here legally binding?

That depends on the document and on where you are, and it is not something this page can answer for you. What it can tell you is what the file contains: a drawing of your signature placed on the page, with no certificate and no cryptographic seal. Plenty of forms and internal approvals accept exactly that. If you have been asked for a digital signature or a certificate-based one, you need software built for it.

Why will it not let me type in my language?

The fonts built into every PDF reader cover Western European characters and nothing else, and this tool does not embed a typeface of its own. Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari and CJK scripts have no place in that encoding, so the tool names the character it cannot write rather than producing a file of empty boxes. A sticky note can hold any script, because its text is stored rather than drawn.

Will the person I send the file to see my sticky notes?

Only if their reader shows annotations, and several hide them until comments are turned on. Notes also never appear in print. Use the text tool for anything that has to be read by everyone who opens the file.

Can I black out confidential information with a filled box?

You can draw the box, and it will hide the words on screen, but every one of them is still in the file underneath it and comes back out with a copy and paste or any extraction tool. Published documents have been read this way within hours of release. Use Redact PDF, which rebuilds the marked pages without the covered content and then searches the result to confirm it is gone.

Does the document stay searchable after editing?

Yes. Pages are not rasterised or flattened, so existing text stays selectable and searchable, and the text you add is real text that a reader can find and extract as well.

Can I undo something after I have placed it?

Yes. Undo and redo cover every step, and anything on the current page can be taken off from the list under it. Nothing is written to a file until you press save.