Edit PDF

How it works

1. 1

   Open the PDF Press Choose a file, or drop the PDF onto the upload area. The editor opens on page 1, with thumbnails of every page on the left of wider screens.

2. 2

   Change a line In Text mode, click a line: the settings panel shows its current text and a box for the new one. Adjust Size, Font or Color, drag the line to move it if needed, then press Save.

3. 3

   Replace a word everywhere Press Search, type the word to find and its replacement, then press Replace all.

4. 4

   Tick boxes Switch to Checkboxes, pick a mark (X, ✓, ■ or ●) and click the middle of each box to tick.

5. 5

   Sign Switch to Signature, draw or type your signature and press Validate; an uploaded PNG or JPG image is ready to place as soon as it loads. Click the page to place it, resize it and click it to confirm: Download writes it into the file, as in Sign PDF.

6. 6

   Download Press Download to get name_edited.pdf; your original file is not changed. The "File ready" panel then offers to continue with Compress PDF, Sign PDF, Protect or Merge PDF.

How text editing works

The editor reads the text of each page and splits it into blocks. A block is a stretch of text in one style, usually a whole line, while a bold word inside a sentence forms a block of its own.

When you save, the letters of the old text are removed from the page one by one and the new text is written in their place, so the background, pictures and table borders under them stay as they were, on a colored page too. On a scan whose text was recognized by another app, the picture of the old words is covered with a white box. The document title and author, bookmarks, comments and form fields are left as they were.

Replace all changes every match in the whole file, whatever its case, including matches inside longer words: replacing "form" also changes "information". Each replacement keeps the size and color of the text it replaces, and a longer word can run over the next one.

Ticking boxes and signing

In Checkboxes mode, each click draws a black mark at 12 points, centered on the spot you click, so aim at the middle of the box. Four marks are offered: X, ✓, ■ and ●. On a page turned sideways, the mark stays upright as the page is shown. Marks are drawn on the page as characters, not stored as the value of a form field.

In the Signature panel, draw with a mouse or a finger (Enlarge opens a bigger pad), type your name in one of four styles, or upload a PNG or JPG picture. Download writes the placed signatures into the file, with no extra step; Apply fixes them on the page before other changes, and Undo takes them out again. Each one keeps the proportions of your drawing or picture and is drawn upright as the page is shown, on turned pages too.

Limits of the editor

• • Apart from marks and signatures, nothing can be added: no new text, text box, image, shape or annotation, and form fields cannot be filled in.
• • Edited text does not wrap on its own and does not push the lines below: a much longer text runs past the edge of its block.
• • The lines around a change are left as they were. Only letters drawn over those of the change, or joined to them in one glyph, as in the ligature fi, are written again, in Helvetica, Times or Courier.
• • Rewritten text can use Latin letters with common Western European accents, the euro sign and curly quotation marks. Other characters, such as Cyrillic or Greek letters, ł or ř, come out as a dot, including those already in the line you rewrite.
• • There is no OCR. A scanned page holds a picture of the text, so there is nothing to click in Text mode; marks and signatures still work.
• • Text written at a slant, rather than level or at a right angle, cannot be selected.
• • Above 4 MB, the editor shows a warning, detects no text and adds no marks, but signatures can still be added. To change the text, cut the file with Split PDF and edit the part you need.
• • Signatures cannot be added to a protected PDF.