How to Edit Text in a PDF Online

Why PDFs are hard to edit

A Word file stores paragraphs. A PDF stores instructions such as “draw these letters at these places with this font”. There are no real paragraphs or lines inside it. On top of that, the font is usually embedded as a small subset that holds only the letters the document happened to use. If your typo fix needs a letter that was never used, the font simply does not have it.

So an editor has to guess the paragraphs from the positions of the letters, and it cannot always continue in the original font. That is true for every PDF editor, not just this one. What matters is that the tool is honest about it, and that the result is good enough for what you need.

Edit a PDF step by step

1. Open the Edit PDF tool and choose your file. A password protected PDF asks for its password first.
2. Click the paragraph you want to change and type. Long text wraps by itself inside the width of the original paragraph.
3. Use the panel on the right to change the font, size, colour, alignment and style (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough).
4. Use the toolbar to add a text box, insert an image or highlight an area. Undo and redo work for every step.
5. Press Export PDF to save the edited file.

What happens to the old text

When you change a paragraph, the editor covers the old text with a white box (on a scan, a box in the colour of the paper) and writes the new text on top. The new text is written in one of the standard PDF fonts (Helvetica, Times or Courier). Hindi and other special characters use the Noto fonts. Because the original font cannot be reused, the new text can look a little different from the rest of the page. Choose the standard font that is closest to the original.

And here is the part that matters for privacy: the old text is hidden, not deleted. Someone who opens the exported file and selects the area could still copy it. If the old text has to be gone for good, say a name or a number you are replacing, tick “Export pages as pictures”. Every page is then saved as an image, so nothing is left under the new text. The price is that the PDF can no longer be searched or selected.

Scanned PDFs

A scan is a photograph of a page, so there is no text to click on. When a page has no text, the editor offers “Read text (OCR)”. OCR, optical character recognition, looks at the picture and works out the letters. After that you can click a line and edit it. The new text is drawn in the colour of the scan’s paper and ink so that it blends in.

OCR makes mistakes, especially with small print, bad scans and unusual fonts. Read the result before you export, particularly numbers and names.

Rotated pages and passwords

• Pages that are turned by 90, 180 or 270 degrees are shown the way a PDF viewer shows them, and your edits are written back in the right direction.
• A password is only used to open the file in your browser. The exported copy has no password, and its pages are saved as pictures, because an encrypted file cannot be changed directly. If you only want to remove the password and keep the text as real text, use the Lock & Unlock PDF tool instead.

Tips for a clean result

• Edit a whole paragraph at once rather than single letters. Line breaks then come out evenly.
• Keep the new text about as long as the old. A much longer text grows downward and can run into what is below it.
• For a small change, such as a date, you rarely need to touch anything else on the page.
• Zoom in and check the page after each bigger change instead of at the end.
• Check the exported file in a normal PDF viewer before you send it, and keep the original.