Edit a PDF: change text, images and layout, free in your browser

Start here: open the file and click what you want to change

Edit PDFReal text editing, objects, annotations, forms. Free, runs on your device.Open

Drop the PDF on the page. The editor shows the document as it is, and everything on the page is an object you can select: a line of text, a picture, a logo, a highlight someone left behind. Double-click text to retype it, click once to move or delete, and use the thumbnail rail on the side for page work. Every single step undoes with Ctrl+Z and redoes with Ctrl+Y, so nothing you try is a risk until you save.

The rest of this guide walks through each kind of edit, in the order people need them, and ends with the honest part: what a browser editor cannot do, and what to use instead.

What “edit a PDF” covers

People mean 4 different jobs when they say edit, and the editor does all 4 in one place:

The job	What it means	Where it lives
Change existing content	Retype a line, move or delete a picture, delete a paragraph	The editor, double-click
Add new content	A text box, an image, a shape, a drawn line	The editor, or Add text to PDF for the quick case
Annotate	Highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, sticky notes	The editor, or Highlight PDF
Rearrange	Reorder, rotate, delete or insert pages	The thumbnail rail

Two neighbouring jobs look like editing but are their own tools: filling form fields and signing belong to Fill PDF form and Sign PDF, with the full walkthrough in the signing and filling guide. And removing content so nobody can ever recover it is redaction, a different operation entirely, covered below.

Change the text that is already there

This is the edit most tools fake and ours does for real. Double-click a line in the document, and the text becomes editable where it stands:

1. Open the file at /edit.
2. Double-click the line. A box opens on top of it with the line’s text inside.
3. Type. Delete a word, fix a number, rewrite the clause.
4. Press Enter, or click elsewhere, to apply it. Save with Ctrl+S when you are done.

A PDF stores text line by line, so the edit applies to that one line. A shorter text leaves a gap at the end; a longer one runs further to the right and does not wrap onto the next line. A fixed date or price fits without a thought; a rewritten sentence needs a look before you save.

The result is not a picture of new text pasted over the page. The editor rewrites the page content itself, so the changed words remain real, selectable, searchable text. Open the saved file in Acrobat and select the line: it selects like any other. Search for the new wording: it is found. Search for the old wording: it is not, because the save writes the file anew (more on that below). This matters for anything that will be read by software later, from a search inside a 200-page file to a screen reader.

What happens with fonts

A PDF usually carries its fonts inside the file, but often only the exact letters already used. When the file’s font holds every letter your edit needs, the edit stays in that font and nothing shifts. When a letter is missing (an “ł” in a document that never had one, say), the editor sets that line in a bundled Liberation font, Sans, Serif or Mono, which are built to the letter widths of Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, so spacing holds even where the letter shapes differ slightly. A note on screen names the font it used and the letter that was missing, so you do not find out in print. Liberation covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters; other scripts, such as Chinese or Arabic, have no bundled font yet.

The same fix across the whole file

When the wrong word appears 23 times, fix it once. Ctrl+F opens find, Ctrl+H find and replace, across the whole document, with match case and whole words. Searching for “May” with both on finds the month, not “maybe”. Replace all changes every hit in one step, which undoes with one Ctrl+Z. When some hits must stay, step through them with Enter: choose Replace on the ones to change and press Enter again to step past the rest. The find and replace guide has the details and a 500-page test run.

One boundary, stated plainly: edit documents you are allowed to change. A draft, your own invoice, a report before it goes out. A signed contract or anything official should be corrected by whoever issued it and reissued, not patched afterwards.

A real edit versus a white box over the text

Most free “PDF editors” do not edit. They draw a white rectangle over the old text and put a text box on top. The page looks fixed, but the old text is still in the file: it selects under the box, it is found by search, and it copies out with the rest of the page. Here is the difference, drawn:

Our editor does not need the trick, because it edits the page content directly, and it has no white-box button. When a cover is the only option, for words baked into a picture or a scan you only print, draw a white rectangle with the Shape tool and put text on it; the white-out guide shows how, and what each method leaves in the file. We checked the real edit on our invoice test file: after changing the total from 1,190.00 to 1,250.00 and saving, the old total was nowhere in the saved file’s bytes, compressed streams included.

One trap still deserves its own warning: covering or crossing out text is not redaction, and neither is retyping one line. A name or an account number can also sit in a picture, a form field, a link or the document’s properties. If it must never be read again, Redact PDF takes out everything under the boxes you draw, text, picture pixels, drawings, links and fields, and the privacy and protection guide explains how to check the result.

Add text, images, shapes and marks

Not every edit touches what is already there. Adding is often the safer move, because new objects never disturb the original layout.

Text anywhere. Press T, click where the text goes and type; Shift+Enter starts a new line, Enter places it. You choose Sans, Serif or Mono, bold, italic, size, colour, alignment and line spacing. New text is set in Helvetica, Times or Courier, the standard fonts every PDF viewer has, so nothing needs embedding; a letter those fonts lack (ł, ř, Greek, Cyrillic) brings in the matching Liberation font, embedded in the file. Like every edit, it stays real, selectable text. For the quick version of just this job, Add text to PDF opens straight into it.

Pictures. Place a logo on an invoice, a photo in a report, a scanned stamp on a letter (PNG, JPG or WebP). Drag to position; a corner resizes it and keeps its proportions. Photos are stored as JPEG at quality 85, while logos and anything with transparency keep every pixel, so a few added pictures do not balloon a 2 MB document into a 40 MB one.

Shapes and drawing. Rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows, with stroke colour and thickness, plus smooth freehand lines for a hand-drawn mark on a plan or a quick circle around the figure that matters.

Highlights, underlines, strikethroughs and sticky notes. These are written as real PDF annotations, the standard kind, so they show up in Acrobat’s comment pane, in Preview, and inline in Chrome and Edge. A reviewer can read, reply to or remove them, which is the point of an annotation: it is feedback attached to the document, not part of the document’s text.

Move, arrange and organise

Everything on the page is movable. Select an object and drag it; it snaps to the page’s edges and centre and to other objects, so alignment is not guesswork. Arrow keys nudge by 1 point, Shift and an arrow by 10. Ctrl+D duplicates, and copy and paste works across pages, so a styled text box made once lands in the same place on page 1 and page 48.

Pages are objects too. The thumbnail rail reorders pages by dragging, turns, copies and deletes them, and adds new ones: a blank page, the pages of another PDF, or pages made from pictures. On a phone the same lives in the Pages sheet. The rail is also the fastest way to check every page after a document-wide change.

Behind all of it sits one undo stack. Every action, from a retyped word to a deleted page, is a step you can walk back and forward. Nothing is final until you save, and even then you decide what the save means, which brings us to the file itself.

Saving: what the editor does to your file

Saving writes the whole file anew, with your changes in it. Text you changed or deleted leaves no earlier copy behind: on our invoice test the 2,318-byte file came back as a 2,294-byte file, and the old total was in none of it. The result opens correctly in Acrobat, Preview, Chrome and Edge, not only in the tool that made it, and edited text stays selectable and searchable in all 4.

The save menu offers 2 PDFs. Save PDF keeps form fields, marks and notes editable in any app. Save flattened PDF makes filled fields, marks and notes part of the page, so nobody can change them; keep the editable copy for yourself.

One exception, on purpose: a file with a digital signature. Rewriting it would break the signature, so the editor appends your changes after the signed bytes, which keeps the signature valid for what was signed, and it says so when it saves. The signed version, with any text you changed, is then still inside the file. If old text must be gone from a signed file, redact it, which writes a new file and ends the signature.

While you work, a recovery copy lives in your browser’s own storage. Close the tab by accident with unsaved changes, and the editor offers to restore the session when you return. The copy exists only on your device and goes when you close the file or choose Discard.

All of this works on a phone. The same editor, the same engine, running in the phone’s browser: tap text to fix it, pinch to zoom, save to your files. A typo fixed on the train is a realistic job; laying out a brochure on a 6-inch screen is not, and nobody will pretend otherwise.

Free, with the usual catches named

The paid editors are not lying about their prices, but their free tiers come with catches: a few tasks per hour or per day, a file size cap, or a sign-in before the download. Each of those tools uploads your file to their servers to process it, which is also why accounts and limits are possible at all.

getPDF has no task cap, no watermark and no account, and the reason is architectural rather than generous: the editor runs on your device, in your browser, so there is no server doing work that someone must meter. The file never leaves your machine. You do not have to take that on trust: open a file in the editor once, so the engine is in your browser, then turn Wi-Fi off, open the file again and edit. Everything works, because there is nothing left to download and nothing is uploaded. The privacy page explains the architecture in plain words.

The honest limits

A browser editor that claims to do everything is lying somewhere. Here is where this one stops:

Scanned pages hold no text. A scan is a photo of a page. There is nothing to double-click until OCR recognises the letters and adds a text layer. Run the file through OCR PDF first, then edit; the OCR guide covers languages, accuracy and what recognised text looks like when edited.

Grouped content moves as a block. A logo built from 30 shapes, a chart, a decorated heading: the authoring tool grouped them, and they select and move as one object, and text inside them cannot be retyped. Find and replace finds matches inside a group but says how many it could not change. Splitting a group apart is not supported.

Text does not reflow. A PDF page is a fixed canvas, not a Word document. A retyped line stays one line and does not wrap, and deleting a paragraph on page 2 does not pull the text below it upward. For rewriting whole sections, the source document is the better path; without one, PDF to Word gives you flowing text to edit, at the cost of an approximate layout.

Fonts can only be matched, not conjured. When the file’s font lacks a letter you need, the Liberation substitute has the same widths but not the same shapes, and the note on screen names it. Getting the exact original font sometimes means asking the author for the source file.

A signed file keeps its signed version. The save appends to a digitally signed file so the signature stays valid; the old text is still inside it, as described above.

When this is the wrong tool

Three jobs that look like editing and are not:

• Filling a form. If the PDF has form fields, they behave better in the form tool than as text edits: Fill PDF form, with signing at Sign PDF. The signing and filling guide covers both, including what makes a signature hold up.
• Removing sensitive content for good. Deleting text from the page is an edit; making it unrecoverable is redaction. For names, account numbers and anything a stranger must never read, use Redact PDF and read the privacy guide first.
• Making a scan searchable. That is OCR’s job, before any editing: the OCR guide is the place to start.

For everything else, the editor is open above. Drop the file in, double-click the first thing that is wrong, and fix it.