You spot a wrong date in an invoice you sent, an old phone number on a flyer, a misspelled name on a certificate, and all you have is the PDF. This editor is for that: small corrections to text that is already on the page, made without installing anything and without sending the document to anyone.
It is not a full desktop publishing program, and it does not pretend to rebuild the original file. It shows the page, lets you change what is written on it, and tells you plainly what the exported file will be.
Drag & drop a PDF here
or click to choose a file
Accepts PDF up to 50 MB and 300 pages. The file opens in your browser and is not uploaded.
Select text to edit
Click a dashed outline on the page. Use Add text to place a new text box, or Repair area to wipe a rectangle that has no detected text.
Click on the page where the new text should go.
Drag a rectangle over the area to clean up.
The outlined box is the area that gets cleared. Drag it to move, or drag the corner dot to resize.
Edited pages may be flattened during export, which can remove the original selectable/editable text layer. Pages you do not edit are copied across unchanged.
Your edited file is ready ()
Overview
About PDF Text Editor
The editor draws your PDF with pdf.js (the viewer built into Firefox) and finds the lines of text on each page. Every line it finds gets a dashed outline. Click one and its text appears in the panel next to the page, where you can rewrite it, change the size, font style, colour or alignment, or delete it. The preview updates as you type, and Undo and Redo work across everything you have done.
PDFs do not store text as editable paragraphs, so changing a word means covering the old one and drawing a new one. The editor does that for you: it clears the old text, fills the area with the colour or shading around it, and draws your replacement on top. If a page has no text layer, which is the case for scans, run the built-in text recognition (OCR) and the recognised lines become clickable in the same way.
What happens to the file. When you press Apply Changes the new PDF is built in your browser. Pages you did not touch are copied across unchanged. Pages you edited are redrawn as an image with your changes applied. They look like the preview, but they are no longer live text. This guide explains the difference between a real text layer and a scan.
Compatibility
Supported Formats
Accepts PDF files up to 50 MB and 300 pages. Password-protected PDFs are not supported: remove the password in the program that created it, then open the file here. Damaged files are rejected with a message.
Text that runs left to right on a horizontal line can be edited. Rotated or vertical text is shown but not detected. Text recognition (OCR) reads English. The output is a PDF with the same number of pages and the same page sizes as the original. Replacement text can be set in sans-serif, serif or monospace, in regular, bold or italic.
Guide
How to Use PDF Text Editor
- Choose or drag in a PDF. It opens straight away; nothing is uploaded.
- Pick a page (thumbnails on the left, or Previous/Next) and click a dashed outline around the text you want to change.
- Edit the text in the panel. Use Match detected style to go back to the size and colour the editor measured. Press Apply edit, or Delete text to remove the line.
- To add text, press Add text and click where it should go. To clean up a spot with no detected text, press Repair area and drag a rectangle over it.
- For a scanned page, press Detect text (OCR) if it has not started by itself, then click the regions it finds.
- Check the preview, press Apply Changes, then Download. The file is named after yours with "-edited" added.
Highlights
Features
- Edits the text you can see Text lines are located from the PDF's own text layer, so each outline sits where the words are drawn. Scanned pages get the same treatment through on-demand OCR on the page you are viewing.
- Your file stays in your browser Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the OCR engine and fonts are served from this site. Closing the file releases the memory it used.
- Preview first, with undo and redo The page shows your changes as you make them. The old text is cleared and the background around it is rebuilt, and you can move or resize the cleared area or wipe a spot by hand if the automatic fill is not clean.
- Only edited pages are flattened Pages you do not touch are copied into the new PDF unchanged, and the page count and page sizes stay the same. The result tells you which pages were flattened.
Applications
Use Cases
- Correcting a typo, date or amount in a PDF you created and no longer have the source file for
- Updating a phone number, address or price on a flyer or menu you own
- Removing a line that should not be shared (a reference number, an old note) from your own document
- Adding a short note, a date or a label to a page
- Fixing a line on a scan of your own letter after running text recognition
- Checking how a change would look before you redo the document properly in its original program
Change only documents you own or have permission to edit. A PDF edited here is a modified copy, not the original, and should not be presented as the original.
Good to Know
Limitations
Edited pages may be flattened during export, which can remove the original selectable/editable text layer. A page you edit is redrawn as an image (at up to about 180 dpi) with your changes in it, so its text can no longer be selected or searched, and links, form fields and annotations on that page are dropped. Pages you leave alone are copied unchanged, so they keep their text.
Bookmarks and other document-level features are not carried into the new file, and links that jump to other pages may not survive.
Fonts will not match exactly. You can choose sans-serif, serif or monospace, plus bold and italic. The editor measures the size and colour of the original text and fits the new text to it, but a typeface that is not one of those three is approximated.
Backgrounds. On a plain or evenly shaded background the old text disappears cleanly. On a busy photo or a pattern, the filled patch can look smoothed or smeared. Check the preview; you can move or resize the cleared area, use Repair area, or undo.
Text recognition is not perfect. Blurry, skewed or low-contrast scans produce misread letters. Each recognised region shows a confidence figure, and you can re-read a region on its own. Always check recognised text before you apply it.
This is not a redaction tool. Check the exported file yourself if a page must not contain certain information.
This tool runs entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded to our servers. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
Support
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my PDF uploaded to your server?
No. The file is opened with your browser's own file access, and rendering, text recognition and PDF building all run on your device. The recognition engine and its language data are served from this site, not from a third-party CDN. When we tested the page, no request carried the file, its name or any text from it. Closing the file releases it from memory.
Will the edited PDF still have selectable text?
Only on pages you did not edit. Those are copied into the new file as they were, text layer included. A page you edit is rebuilt as an image so that the change looks exactly like the preview, which means the text on that page can no longer be selected or searched. The editor says so before you export and again in the result.
Can I edit a scanned PDF?
Yes, with limits. A scanned page has no text to click, so the editor runs OCR on the page you are viewing (it does not process the whole document at once) and turns the recognised lines into editable regions. Recognition covers English, depends on scan quality, and can misread letters, so check the text before applying. You can cancel a recognition run at any time.
Why does the new text not look exactly like the old font?
The original font is often embedded in a form the browser cannot reuse for new letters, so the editor draws replacement text with a standard sans-serif, serif or monospace face. It matches the size, colour and weight it measured, which is usually close for common fonts and visibly different for decorative ones.
How large a PDF can I open?
Up to 50 MB and 300 pages. Pages are drawn one at a time as you view them, and OCR only runs on the page you ask for, so a long document opens quickly. Exporting a lot of edited pages takes longer and uses more memory because each edited page is redrawn as an image.
Does Google Analytics see my document?
This site uses Google Analytics for ordinary page-view statistics, like every other page here. The editor does not pass it your file, its name or any extracted text, and in our test the analytics requests contained none of them. Your document stays in the browser tab.
Can I open a password-protected PDF?
Not in this version. Remove the password in the program that created the file (or where you legitimately have access to it), save a copy, and open that copy here.
Why is the edited PDF bigger or smaller than the original?
Unedited pages are copied as they are, so they keep their size. Each edited page becomes an image: a page of plain text on a flat background compresses to a small PNG, while a page with photos is stored as a JPEG. A text-only page that was tiny as live text can therefore grow. If the result is larger than you want, <a href="/compress-pdf/">Compress PDF</a> can reduce it.
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