PDF Editor (Add Text, Images & Shapes)

About the PDF Editor (Add Text, Images & Shapes)

Write on a PDF without printing it. Add text boxes (font, size, colour, bold and alignment), images and logos, rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows, freehand drawing, white-out and clickable links — to a web address or to another page — on any page. Move, resize and rotate what you add, step back with undo and redo, and jump between pages with the thumbnails.

When you save, your changes are drawn into the pages as real PDF content: text stays real, searchable text, shapes and drawings stay sharp at any zoom, and JPEG and PNG pictures are stored as they are — except photos larger than 3,000 pixels on their longest side, which are reduced to that, and photos stored sideways, which are redrawn upright; WebP, GIF, HEIC and other formats are converted to JPEG or PNG. Links are added as standard link annotations. The PDF is edited entirely in your browser and never uploaded.

Common uses

• Filling in a form that has no fillable fields: type your name, date and answers where they belong.
• Adding a logo, stamp or photo to a letter, invoice or certificate.
• Marking up plans, screenshots and reports with arrows, boxes, highlights and notes.
• Fixing a typo or an outdated phone number in a PDF when the original document is lost.
• Making a table of contents or a website address clickable.

Why existing text can’t be retyped in place

Most PDFs store only the letters of each font that the document uses (a subset), and many store text in pieces placed one by one rather than as editable lines. Typing new words into the original font would often produce missing or wrong letters. So this editor does what is reliable: Edit text covers the old words with a white-out box in the page’s own colour and adds a new text box with the same words in the closest standard font — Helvetica, Times or Courier, or Noto Sans when the text has characters such as ₹ — at the same size, position and colour. You then change the words. The result can look slightly different from the original font; zoom in to check.

Edit text only finds real text. A scanned page is a picture of text: use White-out and Text there instead.

White-out is not redaction

White-out hides content when the PDF is viewed or printed, but the covered text, images and drawings remain in the file: they can still be found by searching, copied, or recovered by someone who removes the cover. Use it for corrections, not for hiding personal or confidential information. White-out also can’t cover form fields or comments, which PDF readers draw on top of the page.

Fonts and characters

• Helvetica, Times and Courier are the standard PDF fonts: every PDF reader has them, so nothing extra is stored in the file. They cover English and Western European letters and symbols such as € and ©.
• Noto Sans covers ₹, accented Latin letters, Greek and Cyrillic; only the characters you use are stored in the file.
• Scripts that need text shaping — Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Arabic, Hebrew and others — can’t be written correctly by this PDF writer. Add such text as an image (for example a PNG) with Image instead.

Keyboard and screen readers

• Tab to the page, then to each item. Arrow keys move the selected item (Shift: 10 points), + and − resize it, R and Shift+R rotate it, Delete removes it and Escape deselects it.
• With a tool chosen, press Enter on the page to add an item in the middle of what is visible; tool buttons pressed from the keyboard do that at once.
• Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redoes, Ctrl+D duplicates the selected item.
• Every change is also listed under All changes, where each item can be selected or deleted.

Limitations

• Text that is already in the PDF can’t be edited in place; it can be covered and retyped (see above).
• White-out hides content but doesn’t remove it from the file.
• Typed text can’t use scripts that need shaping, such as Devanagari or Arabic; add them as an image.
• Text boxes don’t wrap lines by themselves: press Enter in the Text box to start a new line.
• Password-protected or restricted PDFs must be unlocked first with Unlock PDF.
• Saving changes the file, so existing digital signatures will show as invalid; the editor warns you when a file is signed.
• Links are invisible clickable areas: place them over text or a button on the page.
• Very large files need plenty of memory and can be slow to open and save on phones.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.