Edit a PDF

What "edit a PDF" usually means

Most people who search for a PDF editor do not want to rewrite paragraphs. They want to put a contract's pages back in order, drop the blank page a scanner added, turn the one page that came out sideways, fill in a form someone sent them, sign it and send it back. Those are the jobs this tool does, and it does them without installing anything or uploading the document anywhere.

Pages: reorder, rotate, delete

Drop a PDF and every page is drawn as a thumbnail in a grid. Drag a thumbnail to move it; on a touch screen or keyboard, use the arrow buttons under each page instead. The rotate button turns a page a quarter turn each press, which is what you need for a scan that came in on its side. Remove dims the page and leaves it out of the saved file; nothing is gone until you download, and reset restores the original order and every removed page.

Pages are moved inside the document rather than copied into a new one, so bookmarks, links and form fields on the pages you keep survive the rearrangement.

Filling in forms

If the PDF contains real form fields, they are listed under the page grid with the same controls you would see in a PDF reader: text boxes, tick boxes, radio buttons and drop-downs. Type your answers and they are written into the fields when you run the tool.

The flatten option decides what the recipient gets. Left off, the fields stay editable and the recipient can still change them. Switched on, the values are baked into the page as ordinary content, the fields are removed, and the form can no longer be altered. Flatten before sending a completed application or a signed agreement; leave it off when you are pre-filling a form for someone else to finish.

A PDF that only looks like a form, for example a scanned paper form or one drawn as boxes with no fields behind them, has nothing to fill. For those, place your signature and any short text as an image using the signature tool below, or print and scan.

Signing

Draw your signature in the pad with a mouse, trackpad or finger, or upload a picture of it, ideally a PNG with a transparent background. Choose the page, click where the signature should sit on the preview, and set its width as a share of the page width. The same signature can go on one page or on every page, which is handy for initialling each page of an agreement.

This is an image of your signature placed on the page, exactly like printing the document, signing it and scanning it back. It is accepted for the vast majority of everyday paperwork. It is not a certified digital signature: if a contract requires identity verification and a tamper-evident certificate, use a dedicated e-signature service for that document.

Page numbers

Switch on page numbers and choose where they go (bottom or top, left, centre or right), what they say and where counting starts. The format accepts two placeholders: {n} for the page number and {N} for the total, so "Page {n} of {N}" and "{n}" are both fine. Starting at a number other than 1 is useful when the file is one chapter of a longer document. Numbers are added after reordering and deleting, so they always match the final page order.

Where the limits are

Editing existing text in a PDF is deliberately left out. Fonts inside PDFs are usually subset, meaning only the letters actually used were embedded, so typing a new word often has no glyphs to draw it with, and the browser tools that offer it tend to produce a page that looks right on screen and wrong everywhere else.

Privacy

The documents people edit are the private ones: contracts, ID scans, medical and financial forms. This tool never uploads them. The PDF is read, changed and saved in your browser's memory, and closing the tab removes it.