Edit PDF text

To edit text in a PDF, open the file in the editor above, click the line you want to change, type the new words and press Enter. The page redraws with your change straight away. When you are done, download the edited PDF. There is no account, and the file stays in your browser the whole time.

1. Choose a PDF or drop it on the editor. Files up to 50 MB open.
2. Move over the page. Every line you can edit is outlined when the pointer is on it.
3. Click a line, change the text and press Enter. Press Escape to leave it as it was. Clear the box to delete the line.
4. To write somewhere new, choose Add text and click the page where the line should start.
5. Undo and Redo step through your changes. Download PDF saves a copy with “-edited” added to the name.

Many online editors change text by painting a white box over the old words and typing on top. The page looks right, but the old words are still in the file. Anyone can select them, search for them, or remove the box. That matters when you correct a figure on an invoice or take a name out of a letter.

This editor deletes the characters of the line from the page content itself, then writes the new line on the same baseline. Pictures, lines, tables and background colours under the text are left alone, because only text is removed. Copy, search and screen readers see the new words and nothing else.

A PDF usually carries only the letters its text uses, not the whole font. Change “2024” to “2025” and the 5 may simply not exist in the file. So the editor writes new text in the closest standard font instead: a sans-serif face for fonts like Arial or Calibri, a serif face for fonts like Times or Georgia, and a monospaced face for code and forms. Bold and italic carry over.

The size and colour come straight from the original line, so a red 14 point heading stays a red 14 point heading. In a document set in a distinctive typeface the edited line can look slightly different from its neighbours; for invoices, forms, letters and reports it is usually hard to tell.

Accented letters, Greek and Cyrillic are written with the standard fonts. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters use a built-in fallback font. Only the characters you type are stored in the file, so a few words in another script add a few kilobytes, not megabytes.

A PDF is not a word processor file. It stores where each piece of text sits on the page, not which lines belong to a paragraph. When you add words to a line, the next line does not move down, because the file has no idea the two are connected.

That is why the editor works line by line. Short corrections, like a date, an amount, a name or a typo, fit without touching anything else. For a rewrite of a whole paragraph, change it line by line and keep each line near its old length, or edit the source document and make a new PDF.

A scanned page or a photo of a document is a picture. There is no text in it to change, so nothing on the page can be clicked, and the editor says so. You can still use Add text to write on top of a scan, for example to fill in a printed form that has no form fields.

Text added this way is real text in the PDF, so it can be searched and copied like the rest. It is written in a plain 12 point black sans-serif face, which suits most form boxes.

The editor is a program that runs inside your browser tab. Opening, editing and saving all happen there. pdfly's servers never receive the PDF, so there is nothing to delete afterwards and nothing for anyone else to read. Closing the tab throws the document away.

The editor is built on MuPDF and its source code is public under the AGPL-3.0 license, so what it does with your file can be checked. The link is at the bottom of the editor.

An edited PDF is about the size of the original. If a form or an email limit still rejects it, use the PDF compressor to bring it under the number you need. To send it in parts, split the PDF by size. To add it to other documents, merge PDFs under a size limit.

One PDF at a time, up to 50 MB. Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened; remove the password first. Vertical text is shown but cannot be edited, emoji cannot be typed, and a line that mixes styles is rewritten in the style it starts with. Pages with redactions waiting to be applied must have them applied in your PDF app first.