Free PDF editor: edit PDF files online

What you can do with this free PDF editor

The editor opens your PDF and shows each page exactly as it will print. You work on top of the page: click where you want text, drop in a photo, draw a box around a paragraph, or scribble a note by hand. Pages you do not touch are written back out unchanged, so the rest of the document keeps its original quality.

• Text — click anywhere and type, then set the font, size, colour and alignment.
• Images — add a JPG or PNG, then move, scale and rotate it.
• Shapes — rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows, outlined or filled.
• Freehand drawing — mark up a page with the pen in any colour and thickness.
• White-out — cover a mistake with a white box and retype the correct text over it.
• Pages — rotate, duplicate or delete pages while you edit.

How editing existing PDF text works

This is worth understanding before you start, because every browser-based PDF editor works the same way and few of them say so. A PDF stores text as positioned glyphs rather than as paragraphs, so there is no cursor to drop into a sentence the way there is in Word. To correct a line you cover it with a white box and type the replacement on top. The result looks right and prints right, but the original characters are still inside the file, so this is not a way to redact confidential information.

If the document is one you will keep changing, convert it with PDF to Word and edit it there instead, or keep the source file and export a fresh PDF each time.

Fonts, accents and other alphabets

Text you add can use any of the fonts built into the PDF format — Helvetica, Times, Courier and their bold and italic variants — which keeps the file small because nothing has to be embedded. Type an accent, a Cyrillic or Greek letter, or Vietnamese tone marks, and the editor quietly embeds a subset of Noto Sans instead, so those characters survive in every PDF reader rather than turning into empty boxes.

Edit PDFs free, with no watermark

Desktop PDF editors are sold as a subscription, and most free ones stamp a watermark across the result or stop you after a couple of documents a day. Everything on this page is free, with no account, no daily limit and no watermark, on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android. The browser you already have is the only requirement.

Your files never leave your device

This tool is JavaScript running inside your own browser. Your PDF is read from your disk into the browser’s memory, changed there, and written back out as a download. It is never uploaded, so there is no copy of it on our servers to leak, and nothing to delete afterwards. That matters for contracts, payslips, medical letters, ID scans and anything else you would not email to a stranger.

A quicker tool for some jobs

If you only need to complete a form and sign it, Fill & Sign is faster. To build a fillable form for other people, use Create Forms. To combine documents use Merge PDF, and to turn the finished file into pictures use PDF to JPG.