Edit PDF Online — Add Text, Annotations and Markups Without Installing Software

Most people receive a PDF they cannot easily change: a contract that needs a correction, a report that needs a comment, a scanned form that needs a typed answer. Converting to Word and back risks mangling the layout, and desktop editors cost money. Our free online PDF editor lets you open any PDF in your browser and immediately add formatted text boxes, sticky notes, highlights, underlines, strikethroughs and freehand drawings — then download a finished file that looks right in every viewer. Files up to 50 MB are accepted on the free plan with no account required.

How to Edit a PDF in 3 Steps

1. Upload your PDF — drag the file onto the upload box or click Select PDF to pick it from your device, Google Drive or Dropbox. Files up to 50 MB are accepted on the free plan.
2. Add your edits — use the toolbar to insert text boxes, highlight or underline passages, add sticky notes or comments, draw freehand lines, or stamp an image onto any page. Set font, size and color in the text tool before placing each box.
3. Save and download — click Edit PDF to finalize your changes, then click Download to save the finished file to your device or send it to cloud storage.

Annotation Editing vs. True Text Editing — What Is the Difference?

Understanding this distinction saves frustration. A PDF is not a Word document: text is stored as positioned glyph streams tied to a specific embedded font. Changing a character inside that stream requires the exact font to be present and the metrics to be recalculated — it is technically complex and can easily break layout.

Most online editors — including ours on the free plan — use the overlay (annotation) approach: new objects are added on top of the page without touching the original content. This is fast, safe and compatible with every PDF viewer because annotations are a first-class feature of the ISO 32000 PDF specification. It handles the majority of real-world tasks: corrections, form filling, review comments, signatures and visual markups.

If you need to wholesale rewrite a paragraph — change a contract clause, update prices throughout a brochure — the cleanest route is to convert first with PDF to Word, make the changes in Word, then convert back with Word to PDF. For Excel-based content try PDF to Excel, and for slide decks use PDF to PowerPoint.

What You Can Add and Edit

The editor's toolbar covers the full range of standard annotation types defined in ISO 32000:

• Text boxes — freestanding text overlays with configurable font family, point size, text color, bold and italic. Drag to reposition; resize by the corner handle.
• Highlight — color-backed highlight over selected text passages; choose from yellow, green, blue or pink.
• Underline — places an underline annotation under selected text to indicate importance or a link.
• Strikethrough — a horizontal line through selected text, the standard way to mark proposed deletions in review workflows.
• Sticky notes — a collapsible comment balloon anchored to a point; the author name and timestamp are recorded in the annotation metadata.
• Freehand drawing — ink annotation for circles, arrows, signatures or any freeform mark.
• Image stamps — place a PNG or JPEG logo, seal or signature image at any position and scale.

Editing Scanned and Image-Only PDFs

A scanned PDF is a series of page images with no embedded text. The editor cannot reach inside those images to change pixels — but it can layer any of the annotation types above on top of the image page. This is exactly how you would fill in a printed form that someone has scanned and emailed you: upload the scanned PDF, type your answers into text boxes placed over the blank fields, add your signature, and download a completed copy.

The editor does not run OCR automatically. If you need the scanned text to become selectable, searchable and copy-pasteable before you annotate, run OCR in a dedicated service first, then bring the resulting PDF back here. Once you have a good OCR'd PDF you can also use Extract Text from PDF to pull out the recognized content.

Free vs. Pro Editing Features

For most annotation, correction and sign-off tasks the free plan is all you need. If you are editing large engineering drawings or need true in-place text replacement, Pro unlocks those capabilities. You can also sidestep text-editing limits entirely by converting to Word, editing freely there, and converting back.

Tips for Clean PDF Annotation

• Use sticky notes for questions, text boxes for answers. Notes collapse and do not obscure page content; text boxes should carry text that will live in the final delivered file.
• Match font size to the document. If the surrounding body text is 11 pt, set your text box to 11 pt so corrections blend in visually.
• Compress before editing large files. Run an oversized PDF through Compress PDF first to stay under the 50 MB free limit, then edit the smaller version.
• Rotate pages before annotating. Use Rotate PDF Pages to correct landscape pages before placing text boxes, so coordinates line up as expected.
• Delete unwanted pages first. Use Delete Pages to strip pages you don't need before annotating, to keep the file lean.
• Add page numbers to long documents. After editing, run the file through Add Page Numbers so reviewers can reference specific pages in their feedback.
• Protect the final file. Once editing is done, lock the PDF with Protect PDF to prevent further changes by recipients.

Frequently Asked Questions

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