Free PDF editor — edit the text in your PDF

File name

The mechanics

A PDF stores glyphs pinned to coordinates, not paragraphs. So every editor — this one included — does the same three things:

• Read each text run with its exact position, size and angle.
• Cover the old run with a patch painted in the background colour sampled from that exact spot.
• Redraw your text on the same baseline, at the same size and colour.

Only lines you edit get repainted. Images, tables, vectors and every untouched line stay exactly as they were in the original file.

Editing text

• The Edit text tool shades every editable line in blue. Click one and type.
• A format bar appears above the line: font, size, bold, italic, underline, colour, delete, restore.
• Empty a line to remove it. The revert arrow puts the original back.
• Add text places one box where you click and puts the cursor in it. Type, then click anywhere else to finish — that click ends the box rather than starting a new one. Press T again for the next box. Double-click any box to reopen it, drag it to move, use the corner grip to resize. A box left empty is discarded.
• A line grows to the right as you type. Press the condense button in the format bar to squeeze it back into the width the original text occupied — worth doing inside table cells and columns, where growing would collide with the next column.
• Ctrl+F finds and replaces across every page at once.

Fonts

Edited lines keep the document's own typeface. The font program is lifted out of the PDF, shown in the editor and re-embedded when you save, so a retyped line matches its neighbours.

Two things force a fallback to a standard face, and the editor tells you when it happens: typing a character the original font never contained (embedded fonts are usually subset to only the glyphs the document already used), and switching a line to bold or italic when the file only carries the regular cut. Choosing a font by hand from the Font list is always a deliberate override.

For Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, CJK or a brand typeface that isn't in the file at all, load a .ttf in the Embedded font panel.

Scanned PDFs contain no text objects at all — the page will say so. Run OCR first, or cover and retype with Erase + Add text.

Two ways to save

Save PDF keeps the file fully editable and searchable. It patches over the old glyphs — which means the original wording is still physically present in the file underneath, recoverable by text-extraction tools. That is fine for ordinary editing, and it is exactly how patch-based editing works everywhere.

Flatten re-renders each page as an image at your chosen resolution. What you see is exactly what you get, and the original text is genuinely gone. Use this whenever you are covering something confidential — an erase rectangle alone is not redaction. The cost is that the result is no longer selectable or searchable.

Privacy

Everything runs inside this one HTML file. No upload, no server, no network. Both PDF engines are built into the file, so it works with the internet switched off.

Shortcuts

E edit text · V select · T add text · W erase · H highlight · D draw · R box · O oval · L line · Ctrl+Z/Y undo · Ctrl+S save · Ctrl+F find · Del delete object · Esc deselect