Edit PDF

How to use

1. Open the PDF. Pick Text, Rectangle, Arrow, Draw, or Image. The panel under the cards changes to match.
2. Text: choose a font, then click the page. Bold, underline, and strikethrough apply to that note. Rectangle and arrow: drag. Draw: pick a straight line, or a line that follows the mouse. Image: choose a PNG or JPG, then click or drag a box. Click a mark to select it (blue outline) and drag to move it. Delete selected removes only that mark.
3. Apply edits and download. Open the file. A fill or a stroke is painted on top of the page. It does not delete the original words.

What "edit" means here

People often want to correct a typo inside a contract. This page cannot do that. The existing text is not a word processor. It is a set of drawing commands, sometimes with a font your browser does not have, sometimes split into pieces. Changing one word without breaking the line is a desktop job. What you can do here is add a correction beside the old word: a short note, a box around the clause, an arrow, or a line you draw yourself.

The note is drawn as an image of text, same as page numbers. The font list is Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, Times, and Courier. Those faces are already on the computer, so nothing is downloaded. Digits and English letters are reliable. Accented Latin usually works. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not supported. If you need a non-Latin note, export a PNG from a tool that has the font and place it with Sign PDF, or use the Image card on this page.

A rectangle has a stroke weight (hairline, medium, thick, or heavy), a solid, dashed, or dotted line, and an optional fill. The fill has its own color and its own opacity, so a yellow tint at 40% is not the same as a solid red stroke. A fill covers whatever is under it on screen, with the same limit as Redact PDF: the words underneath can still be copied. Do not use a filled box as a way to remove a secret. Arrows come in five heads: a filled triangle, an open chevron, a stealth head, a head at both ends, or a line that ends in a dot. The shaft can be dashed too.

Draw is either a straight line or one freehand stroke. You set the weight, the color, and the line shape before you press. Afterward you can drag the whole stroke to a new place. You cannot grab one bend and reshape it. An image is stamped as a picture. Rotation and opacity apply to that picture only. A JPEG has no transparent background, so a white box around a logo will print. PNG is the better choice for a logo.

Marks stay on the page where you drew them. They are not comments that a reviewer can accept or reject. Dashed lines, arrows, and handwriting are images painted onto the page, so they print, but Acrobat will not treat them as movable annotations. They do not flatten the rest of the page, so text that was selectable stays selectable, unlike Compress PDF.

A sensible order

Reorder or rotate first if a page is sideways, then edit, then number if you need numbers, then protect if the file should ask for a password. Editing a locked file is refused. Cropping after you place a note can cut the note off if it sat in the margin you remove, so crop before you annotate.

Forty pages can be opened. You do not have to mark all of them. Unmarked pages are copied as they were. A very long note is clipped at 80 characters so a click does not paint a paragraph across the sheet. For a paragraph, write it in Word to PDF and merge that page.