Edit PDF online
Highlight text, add comments, shapes, images, and freehand drawings to your PDF.
How to edit a PDF online for free
- 1
Open the PDF you want to edit
Click Select PDF file and pick your document. Every page renders as a stacked vertical preview in the workspace, ready to be marked up — click any page thumbnail in the sidebar to jump straight to it.
- 2
Pick a tool from the sidebar toolbar
The right-hand sidebar shows nine tools laid out in a row: Select, Highlight, Text, Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Arrow, Freehand and Image. Click one to arm it — a small style panel appears just below with the relevant colour swatches, font size, stroke width or fill opacity for whatever you're about to place.
- 3
Click, drag or draw directly on the page
Highlights, rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows and text boxes are drawn by clicking and dragging on the page. Freehand follows your cursor or finger like a pen. Image drops the picture at the point you click. Switch back to Select at any time to grab an existing annotation and move it, resize it, or open its style panel to change colour and size.
- 4
Undo, redo, then export as a new PDF
The toolbar has Undo and Redo buttons (Ctrl/Cmd+Z and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z), plus a Trash icon on any selected element to remove it. When the page looks right, click Save PDF — the tool draws every annotation permanently into a fresh copy of the file and hands it back with an -edited suffix. Your original file on your device is untouched.
What you can add to any PDF
The sidebar toolbar exposes nine tools, each with its own style panel: Select for grabbing and adjusting anything already on the page; Highlight for translucent yellow, green, pink or blue bands over a passage; Text for typed text boxes with adjustable font size, colour and bold; Rectangle and Ellipse for closed shapes with a stroke colour, stroke width and optional filled interior at any opacity; Line and Arrow for clean straight strokes with a chosen colour and thickness; Freehand for pen-style drawing that follows the cursor or finger; and Image for dropping a PNG or JPG onto the page and resizing it. Everything is placed by click-and-drag or, in the case of Image, by a single click at the target spot.
An honest note: adding vs rewriting
A PDF is not a Word file. Its existing text is baked into the page — often with fonts embedded and each letter positioned individually — which means no browser tool can genuinely rewrite that text the way you'd edit a paragraph in a document. What this editor does is let you add new content on top: type corrections beside a wrong value, strike through with a Line, cover a block with a filled Rectangle, highlight a clause, or drop a comment in the margin.
For everyday needs — filling a form that has no fields, marking up a review, correcting a typo, annotating study material — the add-on-top approach is exactly right. If you need to genuinely hide sensitive content so nobody can recover it, use Redact PDF. If the PDF has real interactive form fields you want to fill properly, use Fill PDF Forms.
Private editing, your documents stay yours
The PDFs people edit are usually live working documents — a contract under review, an application with personal details, a salary slip being corrected, a form with a home address on it. This editor runs entirely inside your browser tab: the file loads locally, the annotations are painted on the local page previews and the final file is written on your device with pdf-lib. Nothing is transmitted to us or to any third party at any point.
Once the page has finished loading you can disconnect from the internet and the whole editor keeps working. There is no account that remembers what you edited yesterday and no server-side copy that could be leaked in a breach.
Fill anything, form or not
Type text boxes anywhere on the page — on a real PDF form field, on a flat scanned form that has no fields at all, in the blank space beside a printed line, on top of a wrong value. Font size runs from small caption text to headline size, and the colour swatch lets you match ink-blue or plain black.
Review like on paper
Highlight in yellow, green, pink or blue to mark passages. Draw a red rectangle or ellipse around a clause. Sketch a freehand circle or arrow with the Freehand and Arrow tools, or use Line for a quick strike-through. Everything a red-pen review needs is a click away in the toolbar.
Every annotation becomes part of the PDF
On export, each highlight, text box, shape, line, freehand path and image is drawn permanently into the page content stream with pdf-lib — not attached as a floating comment layer that some viewers ignore. The downloaded file shows your edits identically in Acrobat, Preview, Chrome, Edge, Foxit and every other reader.
Free and unlimited
There is no signup, no watermark on the output, no daily quota and no upsell to a paid plan for larger files. Edit a one-page form or a two-hundred-page contract in the same session and export as many revisions as you want.
When do you need to edit a PDF?
Filling a form that has no fillable fields
Scanned tax forms, printed rental applications and older government PDFs frequently arrive without any interactive fields at all. Arm the Text tool, click on each blank line and type — no need to print, hand-fill and re-scan just because the original was flattened.
Reviewing a contract or draft before sending it back
Open the draft, highlight the clauses that need attention in yellow, draw a red rectangle around the payment terms, and drop a text box in the margin with your comment. Send the edited PDF back and the other side sees every note exactly where you put it.
Correcting a small mistake without redoing the whole document
Draw a Line through the wrong figure to strike it out and type the correct number beside it with the Text tool. It's the same workflow you'd do with a pen on a printout, but the result stays crisp and searchable in the exported PDF.
Marking up study material and lecture slides
Highlight the definitions that matter, circle example numbers with Freehand, and drop text boxes with your own explanations next to dense diagrams. The annotated PDF re-opens with every note in place on your laptop, tablet or phone.
Frequently asked questions
How can I edit a PDF for free without Adobe?+
Click Select PDF file, pick a tool from the sidebar (Highlight, Text, Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Arrow, Freehand or Image), then click and drag on the page to place it. Use Select to grab existing annotations and adjust them, Undo/Redo to step through changes, and Save PDF when you're done to download an edited copy. No Acrobat, no install, no signup.
Can I change or delete the existing text in a PDF?+
No — and this is worth being clear about. A PDF stores its existing text as fixed content on the page (often with fonts baked in and letters positioned individually), so it isn't editable the way a Word document is. This tool lets you add on top: type a new value beside the wrong one, draw a Line through text to strike it out, or paint a white Rectangle over a block to cover it. If you need to permanently remove sensitive content so it can't be recovered, use Redact PDF. If the PDF has real interactive form fields, use Fill PDF Forms to type into them properly.
Can I type on a scanned PDF?+
Yes. The Text tool places a text box at whatever coordinate you click, whether the page is a scanned image or a native PDF. Pick a font size that matches the surrounding print, choose a colour and type — the box behaves the same on a scan as it does on a digitally-generated page.
Can I highlight text?+
Yes. Arm the Highlight tool and drag a rectangle over the passage you want to mark — you can pick yellow, green, pink or blue from the style panel. The highlight is a translucent coloured band drawn behind the text on export, so the words remain fully readable underneath.
Can I draw on a PDF?+
Yes. Freehand follows your cursor or finger to draw any shape or signature-style scribble; Line and Arrow give clean straight strokes; Rectangle and Ellipse give closed shapes with optional fill and adjustable stroke width. Every one of them has its own colour swatch and thickness control in the sidebar.
Will my edits show in other PDF readers?+
Yes. On Save PDF the tool uses pdf-lib to draw every highlight, text box, shape, freehand path and image directly into the page's content stream — not as loose comment annotations that some viewers hide. The exported file renders identically in Acrobat Reader, Preview, Chrome, Edge, Foxit and any other PDF viewer, and prints the same way too.
Do my files get uploaded to a server?+
No. Loading the PDF, painting the annotations onto the page previews and writing the final -edited.pdf all happen inside your browser tab using standard Web APIs. Nothing about the file is transmitted anywhere, and once the page has loaded the whole workflow keeps working offline.
Can I edit a PDF on my phone?+
Yes — the Freehand tool follows your finger, highlights and shapes are drawn by touch-drag, and text boxes open a normal on-screen keyboard for typing. Fine positioning on a small screen is easier if you drop the element first with a rough touch and then switch to Select to nudge it into place.
Can I remove an annotation before saving?+
Yes. Switch to the Select tool, click the annotation you want to remove and press the Trash icon that appears in its style panel, or hit Delete on your keyboard. Undo (Ctrl/Cmd+Z) rolls back the last change; Redo (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z) puts it back — the history keeps roughly a hundred steps.
How do I fill a PDF that has real form fields?+
Use Fill PDF Forms instead. That tool detects the document's AcroForm fields (the clickable boxes and checkboxes the PDF's author set up) and lets you fill them directly, so the values are stored as proper form data rather than free-floating text on top of the page.