How to edit a PDF in your browser

Most PDF editing is small. A wrong date, a missing initial, a logo that should have been on the first page. The awkward part has never been the edit itself, it has been getting the file to something that can make it.

The editor runs in this tab. Choose your file and the pages appear as they are, at full quality, with nothing sent across a network.

Change text that is already there

Click a line of existing text and retype it. The editor writes your new words into the page in the font the line was set in, where the old ones stood, so a corrected date looks like the rest of the document instead of like a patch. The old words are removed from the page content, not hidden under a box. Deleting a line takes it out the same way, and dragging one moves the document's own text to the new place.

Two things limit this, and they are properties of the file rather than of the tool:

• If the font was embedded without the characters you type, the editor redraws the line in the closest match it has and tells you which characters were missing. Accented letters in a document typeset only in ASCII are the usual case.
• If the page is a scan, there is no text to click. It is a picture of text. Run OCR first and the words become selectable.

Add something new

The toolbar adds text, images, shapes, freehand marks and whiteout. Each lands as an object you can drag, resize and delete until you export.

Whiteout is worth knowing about. It covers, it does not remove. To take a line of the document's own text out, delete it instead. For anything else that genuinely must not be recoverable, delete the page or flatten the result rather than painting over it.

Sign it

Fill and Sign is the same page view with a narrower job: click into form fields, tick boxes, then sign by typing your name in a handwriting face, drawing it, or adding a photo of the signature you already use.

Signatures can be kept in this browser and reused, so the next form takes seconds. They are stored on your device, not on an account.

Fix the pages, not the words

When the problem is the page rather than what is on it, the editor can delete a page, rotate it or insert a blank one. To change the order, use Organize, where you drag thumbnails into place, and to trim the margins, use Crop.

Export

The new PDF is assembled in this tab and saved to your downloads. Keep your own copy, because nothing is stored for you anywhere else.