Add text, fill in a form that has no form fields, cover a mistake, drop in an image, or annotate a page before sending it back. Upload your PDF above and the editor opens in your browser — nothing to install.
Below: what editing a PDF actually means, why some documents let you change existing text and others do not, and the one step to take before you send an edited file to anyone.
This explains almost every frustration people have with PDF editors, and it is worth two minutes.
A Word file describes structure — this is a paragraph, this is a heading, this is a table. When you delete a sentence, everything after it reflows automatically, because Word knows what a paragraph is.
A PDF describes appearance — place this glyph at these coordinates, in this font, at this size. There are no paragraphs, no line relationships, no reflow. The file is closer to a set of printing instructions than a document.
So editing a PDF is really drawing on top of a fixed page. You add text boxes, shapes, images and annotations over the existing content. That works beautifully for filling, annotating and correcting. It works badly for rewriting a paragraph, because nothing reflows and the surrounding text will not move out of the way.
If you need to genuinely rewrite the document, convert it first: PDF to Word gives you a file where text behaves like text, and Word to PDF converts it back when you are done.
The jobs this handles well, and they cover most of what people actually need:
For whole-page operations, other tools are quicker: Delete Pages, Rotate PDF, Merge PDF, Split PDF and Crop PDF each do one job well without opening an editor at all.
The most important thing on this page, because getting it wrong leaks real information.
A PDF is a stack of drawing instructions executed in order. Drawing a white or black box over a name adds one more instruction to the end of that stack: fill this area. The instruction that draws the name is still there, earlier in the sequence.
Anyone can recover it, and it takes no skill:
Drag across the covered area, press Ctrl+C, and paste into a text editor — the hidden text appears. Or open the file in a PDF editor, click the box, press delete. Or run the document through any conversion tool, which reads the underlying content and ignores what was drawn on top.
So if you are hiding something confidential, this is the wrong tool. Use Redact PDF, which removes the content itself rather than covering it — then verify by selecting all the text and pasting it somewhere to confirm nothing sensitive appears.
Open the file and try to select a sentence with your cursor.
If nothing highlights, the page is a photograph. There is no text in it to click on, edit or search — only pixels. You can still add text boxes and annotations on top, which is exactly how people fill in scanned forms, but you cannot alter what is already printed.
To make a scan searchable and selectable, run it through OCR PDF first. That adds an invisible text layer behind the image, so the page looks identical and Ctrl+F starts working. If the scan is sideways, rotate it before OCR — recognition accuracy drops sharply on rotated pages.
Everything you add in an editor — text boxes, images, annotations, highlights — sits as a separate object layered over the page, not merged into it.
That means a recipient with a PDF editor can select your additions, move them, or delete them outright. It also means some readers, particularly on mobile and in browsers, display or print annotations inconsistently — so what you see is not always what they see.
Flatten PDF merges everything permanently into the page content. Afterwards there is nothing to click and nothing to drag off, and the document looks the same in every reader. For anything you are sending externally, this step is worth the extra thirty seconds.
Sign PDF handles signatures specifically, Flatten PDF fixes your edits into the page, Redact PDF removes confidential content properly, and PDF to Word gives you a file you can genuinely rewrite. Browse all PDF tools.