PDF Editor
Click any text on a PDF to edit it. Add new text, signatures, or notes. Everything runs in your browser. Your file is never uploaded.
What is the PDF Editor?
The PDF Editor lets you click directly on the text inside a PDF and rewrite it. Unlike most online editors that overlay a new text box on top of the original page, this tool actually erases the underlying glyphs and redraws your new text in the same position, so the saved PDF reads cleanly and does not look like marked-up homework.
It runs entirely in your browser. The PDF you open is never uploaded to a server. Your local file is loaded into memory by pdf.js for rendering and pdf-lib for write-back, both of which are open-source libraries developed by Mozilla and the broader web community.
How to edit text in a PDF
- Drop your PDF onto the workspace above, or click to browse.
- Use the Edit mode (default) and click on any piece of text in the page. A small popover appears with the existing text prefilled.
- Type your new text and click Apply. The change appears on the page immediately.
- Switch to Add text mode to drop a fresh text box anywhere you want.
- Use Undo to revert the last change. Use the page arrows to navigate multi-page PDFs.
- When you are done, click Download edited PDF to save the result.
Features
- Click-to-edit text: any glyph on the page is one click away from being editable.
- Add text mode: drop new text anywhere, change weight and size from the popover.
- Page navigation: arrow keys or buttons to move through multi-page PDFs.
- Undo: every change is reversible.
- Bold and size controls on every edit.
- Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd or Ctrl + Enter to apply, Esc to cancel, Cmd or Ctrl + Z to undo, Cmd or Ctrl + S to save.
- No upload: your file never leaves your browser. Even when offline.
Privacy and how it works
Most PDF editors online send your file to a server, which means your data lives on someone else's machine for at least as long as the editing session, and often longer. This editor does not. The tool uses two open-source libraries inside your browser.
pdf.js reads the PDF and produces a list of text items, each with a position and font metrics. The tool draws those onto an HTML canvas to show you the page.
pdf-lib takes your edits and writes them back into the original PDF bytes. For each edited piece of text, the tool draws a white rectangle over the original glyphs and then draws your new text at the same coordinates, using a Helvetica fallback. New text added in Add text mode is written directly without any erasure.
When you click Download edited PDF, the resulting bytes become a Blob in browser memory and your browser saves it like any other download. No server is involved at any step.
Frequently asked questions
Will the saved PDF preserve the exact original font?
No. This is a fundamental limit of in-browser PDF editing. The original PDF embeds whatever font the author used, often as a subset that does not include the characters you typed. To keep the workflow free and offline, the editor falls back to Helvetica or Helvetica Bold, which are part of the PDF specification and always available. For most documents this is visually close enough.
Why does my edit sometimes leave a faint gap?
The tool erases by drawing a white rectangle over the original text bounding box. If your PDF has a colored background or images directly behind the text, the white rectangle will show. Use Add text mode in those cases and place new text on a clean area instead.
Does this work for scanned PDFs?
Not directly. Scanned PDFs contain images, not text. Run them through the OCR PDF tool first to convert the image to selectable text, then bring the result here.
How big a PDF can I edit?
Practically up to about 100 MB. Beyond that, browser memory becomes the limit. The tool caps the rendered scale at 1.5x to stay snappy on large documents.
What about encrypted or password-protected PDFs?
Run them through the Unlock PDF tool first. The editor does not handle password decryption itself.