Edit a PDF in another language or script: what works, what does not

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1. Drop the PDF on the box above.
2. Double-click the line, type the change and press Enter.
3. Read the status line at the bottom. If it says “Set in” and a font, the line went into a substitute; if it says nothing, the edit stayed in the file’s own font.
4. Click Save.

For the scripts the editor can write, the question is not the language. It is whether the font inside the file carries the letters you type, and if not, whether the editor has a font that does.

What works, script by script

We tested each script on a test invoice printed to PDF from Chrome in Arial, whose embedded subset held only the letters the invoice used, then saved and searched the result. The last 4 rows were checked again on 11 October 2026, after the editor started refusing scripts it cannot write.

Script	Example	Result	Searchable after saving
Western European accents	Österreich, café	Standard font (Helvetica, Times, Courier) when the file lacks the letter	Yes
Polish, Czech and other Central European	Karol Michał, Łódź; Jana Čermák	Liberation, embedded	Yes
Cyrillic	улица Пушкина	In the file’s own font when the letters are there, else Liberation	Yes
Greek	Θεσσαλονίκη	Liberation, embedded	Yes
Vietnamese	Đã thanh toán	Liberation, embedded	Yes
Hebrew	שלום	Refused with a message; the line stays as it was	The original line, unchanged
Arabic	مرحبا	Refused with a message	The original line, unchanged
Chinese, Japanese, Korean	北京	Refused with a message	The original line, unchanged
Thai, Devanagari and other Indic scripts, Armenian, Georgian		Refused with a message	The original line, unchanged

The bundled Liberation Sans, Serif and Mono have between 2,423 and 2,622 glyphs each: Latin with its extensions, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese, plus Hebrew letters the editor does not use, and nothing for Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Devanagari, Armenian or Georgian.

Latin with accents: Polish, Czech, Hungarian and the rest

Accented letters cause more substitutions than any other script, because subset fonts carry exactly the letters the author typed. A document that names Jane Cooper in Vienna carries no Č, no ł, no ő. Change it to Jana Čermák in Linz, and the editor needs a letter the file never had.

What happens then depends on the letter:

• Letters of Western European languages (é, ü, ñ, ø, Ö) are in the standard PDF fonts. The line moves to Helvetica, Times or Courier, chosen from the original font’s name. From Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New, widths stay the same.
• Letters beyond them (ł, ř, č, ő, ş, ğ) are not. The line moves to the matching Liberation font, which is embedded in the file: about 230 KB, once per font. The status line says, for example, “Set in Liberation Sans, embedded: the standard font has no Č.”

In our test, “Bill to: Jane Cooper” became “Bill to: Jana Čermák, Graz” in Liberation Sans. The name reads correctly, searches correctly, and has Arial’s letter widths.

Cyrillic and Greek

If the file’s font already carries the letters you need, the edit stays in that font. On our test invoice, an Arial line “улица Ленина” changed to “улица Ленна” in place, because every letter was already there. Changing it to “улица Пушкина” needed a П and a ш the subset lacked, so the line went into Liberation Sans, and it was 80.0 points wide against 71.1 before, longer text in a font of the same widths.

Greek works the same way. The difference you may notice is in the letter shapes: Liberation is a plain sans or serif, so a line in an elegant Greek display font becomes plainer. Compare it with its neighbours before saving.

Right-to-left and Asian scripts: the honest part

These are the hardest cases for any editor, and the editor here does not write them yet. Type Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, an Indic script, Armenian or Georgian, into an existing line or a new one, and nothing is written. The status line says why, naming the script: “Arabic text is not something this editor can write yet: no font it carries has those letters, so the change was not made.”

• Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Devanagari and the others have no letters in the bundled fonts, and Arabic also needs letters joined in context, which line-by-line editing does not do. Written anyway, they would come out as empty boxes.
• Hebrew letters are in Liberation, but the editor would store them back to front, so search would not find the word and copying it out would give the letters reversed. It is refused for that reason.

Text already in the file in these scripts stays as it is. You can move it, resize it with a corner handle or delete it. Its font, size, bold and colour cannot be changed: a restyle rewrites the line in a bundled font, so the editor refuses it with the same message, and the line stays exactly as it was.

For documents in these scripts, edit the source in Word or the original app and export the PDF again. Acrobat, which can use fonts installed on your computer, is the other route.

Check the fonts first

Before a long editing session, see what the file carries. Inspect lists every font by name and whether it is embedded. A name like BAAAAA+ArialMT, with 6 capital letters and a plus sign in front, is a subset: expect substitutions for letters the document did not already use. A font that is not embedded at all is drawn by each reader’s viewer with its own copy, and an edit keeps it that way. Why the font changes when you edit a PDF goes through every case.

New text in another language

Adding text rather than changing it follows the same rules. With the Add text tool (T), “Zapłacono 12 marca”, “Оплачено”, “Πληρώθηκε” and “Đã thanh toán” each went into the page in embedded Liberation Sans and were found by search in the saved file. New text in Arabic, Hebrew or Chinese is refused with the same message as an edit. Adding a text box covers the tool.

Scanned pages in other languages

A scan holds no text, so there is nothing to edit until OCR recognises it, and OCR needs to know the language. That is its own topic: the OCR guide covers the languages and how accurate they get.