Edit PDF

What does "Edit PDF" do?

PDFtez's Edit tool lets you add three kinds of mark-up directly onto a PDF page — without converting the file back to Word, opening a desktop editor, or signing up to anything. It's the right tool when the changes you need are additive (adding something to a page) or destructive at the surface level (covering text with a white box), rather than restructuring the document.

• Text annotation. Click anywhere on a page and start typing. Pick the font size and colour from the toolbar. Useful for filling out non-fillable form fields, adding comments, or stamping a note on a page.
• Freehand draw. Click and drag to draw strokes in any colour. Useful for circling things, drawing arrows, or sketching corrections.
• White-out. Drag a rectangle in white-on-white to cover text or graphics you don't want visible. The mark is a literal white rectangle on top — see the Redact PDF tool if you need the hidden content actually destroyed.

For changes that need to edit the original text in place (fix a typo in a paragraph, change a number in a table), Edit PDF can't help — PDFs don't store the source text as editable paragraphs, and re-flowing existing text reliably requires going back to the original Word/InDesign source. For that workflow use PDF to Word instead.

When to use Edit PDF

• Filling non-fillable forms. A government or rental form that arrives as a flat PDF (no form fields) can still be completed by typing text directly onto the form lines.
• Adding comments and corrections. Circle a paragraph you want changed, draw an arrow to a graphic, type a note like "needs source" — all in one pass without leaving the browser.
• Filling in dates or signatures by hand. Combine Text and Draw to type a name and draw a signature next to it.
• Covering small obsolete details. An old address, a superseded phone number, or a placeholder watermark can be covered with a white-out rectangle and replaced with new text.
• Marking up evidence or exhibits. Underline key sentences, draw arrows to specific table cells, add labels — useful for legal mark-up, peer review, and any "show me where it says..." reply.
• Quickly amending a printed receipt or invoice scan. Cover the wrong total with a white-out box, type the corrected number, save. Faster than re-issuing.

How PDFtez edits your PDFs (under the hood)

PDFtez's Edit tool runs entirely inside your browser. PDF.js renders each page to a canvas so you can see and click on it. Text, draw strokes, and white-out rectangles are captured as overlay objects with their page-relative coordinates. When you click Save, pdf-lib draws each overlay object onto the corresponding page using PDF drawing primitives — text becomes embedded text in the chosen font, strokes become vector lines, white-outs become filled rectangles. The result is a normal PDF that any reader can open.

None of your file ever leaves your device. You can verify this in DevTools → Network while you edit and save.

How is PDFtez Edit different?

Most browser-based PDF editors fall into two camps: simple tools that upload your file to a server before letting you mark it up (iLovePDF, SmallPDF, PDF24, Sejda), and full desktop editors that genuinely edit the underlying text (Adobe Acrobat Pro, PDF Expert, Foxit). PDFtez is deliberately the third option — a lightweight in-browser editor for adding mark-up without ever uploading.

The trade-off is that PDFtez doesn't try to edit the original text in place; instead it lays new content over the existing pages. For 90% of "I need to mark this up before sending it back" situations that's exactly what you want. For genuine content surgery — re-flowing paragraphs, changing fonts of existing text, editing a table — convert to Word first.

Frequently asked questions

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