Edit PDF

How to use Edit PDF

1. 1

   Upload the PDF you want to edit.

2. 2

   Click anywhere on a page to add text, or pick a shape or highlight tool.

3. 3

   Move, resize and style your annotations until everything looks right.

4. 4

   Click Save and download the edited PDF.

What "editing a PDF" actually means

PDF was designed as a final format: a description of where marks sit on a page, not a document with paragraphs that reflow. That is why editing one never feels like editing a Word file, in any tool, Adobe's included. There is no paragraph to re-wrap — there are runs of glyphs at fixed coordinates.

In practice that gives you two honest options. You can overlay: add text, boxes, images, signatures and redactions on top of the page, which works on any PDF and always looks right. Or you can round-trip: convert to Word, edit the text properly, convert back — which reflows text but can shift a complex layout. Overlay for annotations, form filling and small corrections; round-trip when you need to rewrite whole paragraphs.

What you can do here

The editor works as an overlay on the real page, so what you place is what prints. Everything you add stays a separate object until you export, which means you can move, restyle or delete it at any point before saving.

• Add text anywhere, choosing font, size and colour.
• Cover a mistake with a white box and type the correction over it — the standard fix for a wrong date or figure.
• Insert an image, a logo, or a signature drawn with the mouse or trackpad.
• Draw and highlight freehand, and add shapes and arrows to point at something.
• Reorder, rotate and delete pages, and insert blank ones.

Editing a scanned PDF

If your PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, its pages are photographs. There is no text to edit because there is no text in the file — try selecting a sentence with the cursor; getting nothing is the quickest way to confirm what you are dealing with.

You still have two routes. Overlay works normally: cover and retype, sign, fill in the blanks. Or run the file through OCR first, which recognises the characters and adds a searchable text layer underneath the image, after which the document becomes searchable and copyable.

Redaction is not a black rectangle

Drawing a black box over a national insurance number hides it visually while leaving the text underneath perfectly intact — copy-paste, or any text extractor, retrieves it in seconds. This mistake has leaked witness names and salary data from published documents more than once, and it is the single most consequential thing to get right about editing PDFs.

Use the redaction tool, which removes the underlying content rather than covering it. If you are unsure whether something was truly removed, export the file, reopen it, and try to select the redacted area. Nothing should come out.

Editing without uploading the document

Every step runs inside your browser, using the WebAssembly and Canvas APIs your device already ships with. No file is uploaded, no copy is kept, and nothing sits in a queue on a server waiting to be deleted — which is also why the tool keeps working with the network disconnected.

The documents people edit are contracts, offers, medical forms and tax paperwork. Running the editor locally means the file is never in anyone else's hands — which under GDPR is a requirement rather than a nicety when the document contains someone else's personal data.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Keep reading

• A Black Box Is Not Redaction

  Drawing a rectangle over sensitive text leaves the text in the file, fully copyable. Here is how the leaks happen, and how to remove information for real.

• Signing Documents Online: What Is Actually Required

  Electronic signature or digital certificate, what makes a signature binding, and why the version most people produce looks obviously pasted on.