Edit PDF text

Fix the typo. Send the file.

Click the wrong line, type the right words, and the paragraph closes up around them — in your document’s own font. $99 once and it is yours, and we never see your files.

It changes words that are already there — and says so, by name, when it can’t

Never think about a PDF subscription again

Acrobat is about $155 a year and Smallpdf about $108, and both stop working the day you stop paying. PDFMod is $99, once, and the whole toolkit is yours — this, redaction, signing, OCR, all of it. Fix a typo in four years’ time without renewing anything. If you only need it this week, it is $25 for the week.

And your contract, your medical letter, your passport scan stay on your laptop. Not “encrypted in transit”, not “deleted after an hour”: we never see them, because nothing you open here is stored on a server. There is no account to make before you try it, either — open a file and change a word right now. (If you would rather check that than take our word for it, there is a section further down that tells you exactly how.)

What you get

• The word changes and the document still looks like itself. Your replacement is drawn with the font already inside your file, at the size that line is set in. Nothing is re-laid-out, nothing is rebuilt: the page keeps its own images, its bookmarks, its form fields and its links, because the only thing that changes is a range of bytes inside one content stream.
• A longer replacement re-breaks the paragraph. Type three extra words and the words at the end of the line move down to the next one, all the way to the end of the paragraph. Each line is rewritten where it already sits, so nothing slides down the page and nothing below the paragraph shifts.
• You read the change before it happens. Every line it would rewrite is listed, before and after, while the file is still untouched — and so is anything the re-break would leave behind, named one by one. Then there is a button. Same rule as redaction: no surprises in a document you are about to send somebody.
• Several changes, and undo. Fix the date, then the name, then change your mind about the name. Each change produces a complete, valid PDF, and the page you are looking at is drawn from it — so what is on screen after a change is the file you would download, not a mock-up of it.
• Your original is untouched. PDFMod writes a new copy and hands it to you. The file you started from still says exactly what it said before.

How it makes a change, and what each way costs

There is no line on any page this tool will not take a change to. What differs is how the change gets made. The best way is to rewrite the page’s own bytes: the letterforms, the spacing and the text layer stay exactly as your document had them. That is not always available — and where it is not, PDFMod takes the old words off the page and draws the new ones over the same spot, in your document’s own embedded letterforms wherever they hold the characters you typed. Those lines are marked with a hairline underline before you click them, and the plan says precisely what the second way cost, before anything is written and with an undo beside it.

• A character the font hasn’t got. Most PDFs embed only the letters they actually use. PDFMod looks for the character in the run’s own font, then in every other font inside your file, then in a standard face — and if none of them has it, it draws everything it can and names the exact character it left out.
• Justified text, tables and columns. The spacing that lines both margins up is baked into the file, and moving a table cell moves the column. So these do not re-break: the replacement is fitted into the room the line already has, condensed and if necessary set a little smaller, and the plan tells you by how much in points. Nothing beside it moves — that is measured against the rewritten page, not assumed.
• Line breaks it cannot reproduce. Before PDFMod chooses new line breaks for a paragraph it has to be able to reproduce the paragraph’s existing ones from the same rules. Where it cannot, it does not re-break — it fits your change into the line it is on instead, and says so.
• Type 3, Type 1, and fonts the file only names. A Type 3 font is a set of little drawings rather than a font; a Type 1 program PDFMod cannot read well enough to write through safely; a font the file only names could be drawn differently on the next machine. All three get the drawn edit, using the closest standard face matched on the font’s own descriptor — so a document set in Helvetica comes back in Helvetica — and the plan says the letterforms are a substitute.
• Scans. A scan has no text in it to change, which is a fact about the file rather than a policy. Send it through OCR first and come back: every word OCR found is a target you can click, and a change covers that patch of the photograph and draws your words over it. The picture is otherwise untouched, and the page says all of that before you type.
• Signed, XFA and password-protected files. All three open and all three edit. A password-protected file is opened with your password and the same password is put back on the copy you download — PDFMod will not hand you an unlocked copy of a locked file. A signature is voided by any change, so you are told that before you start and the copy will carry the reader’s “document has been altered” banner. An XFA form’s data lives in an XML packet behind the page, so the page changes and the packet does not — you are told that too, before the button.

What it is not

• It is not a word processor. There is no adding a page, no moving a paragraph, no changing the font, no restyling. It changes words that already exist, where they already are.
• It will not carry a hyperlink or a form field with the words. A link in a PDF is a rectangle on the page with a URL attached, not something joined to the words it covers; a form field, a highlight and a sticky note are the same. Re-break the paragraph and the words move while the rectangle stays, so the link ends up over different text. PDFMod will not drag it to where those words probably went — a phrase that re-breaks across two lines is not one rectangle any more, and a link put back by guesswork is the same species of failure as a black rectangle that removes nothing. Instead it reads the page’s real list of them, names the ones your change would strand and quotes the words each one sits on today, before you press the button. A same-length replacement moves no words and strands nothing.
• It will not reflow across columns or pages. Text pushed off the bottom of a page does not appear at the top of the next one, and text at the foot of column one does not appear at the head of column two. Acrobat attempts this, and it is why Acrobat routinely destroys tables, headers and signature blocks.
• It will not substitute a font to finish the job. A lookalike face is the same species of failure as a black rectangle that removes nothing: it looks done and it is not.
• It will not agree with every PDF, and here are the numbers. Every line takes a change. What differs is how many paragraphs re-break around a longer one, and how many lines have to be drawn on rather than rewritten into the page’s own bytes. Measured on the first page of a spread of real documents: a Word 365 letter re-broke 11 of its 20 paragraphs; a Chrome print-to-PDF, 6 of 17; a Pages document, 4 of 18. An arXiv paper set in Type 1 fonts offered all 41 of its lines and re-broke 8 of its 16 paragraphs — but every line on it is drawn on rather than rewritten, because nothing here can read a Type 1 program well enough to write through it safely, so each change is visible as a change of typeface and the plan says so before the button. That is the shape of it — best on documents that came out of a word processor, honest about the cost on documents that came out of a typesetter. You find out which you have the moment you open the file, not after you have saved it.

If you would rather check than trust us

“We never see your files” is a claim, and you should not have to take a claim on faith from a company you have never heard of. So it is enforced rather than promised, and you can watch it work before you pay anything.

• Watch it yourself. Open your browser’s network tab, drop a PDF in above, change a word, save the result. Nothing goes out. Editing is free and needs no account precisely so you can run a real job and see that before you decide.
• The browser enforces it, not our good intentions. This page is served with a Content-Security-Policy whoseconnect-src names only its own origin. The browser refuses any request to anywhere else — no analytics, no error reporting, no font CDN — whether or not anyone here ever writes one. curl -I the page and read the header for yourself.
• Everything runs in the tab. Your file is read, parsed, changed and written by code already on your machine. That is also why there is a size ceiling: a document past a few hundred megabytes runs the tab out of memory, which is what “we never see your files” costs and a trade worth making.
• Web browser only, this release. There is no Mac app yet. When one ships it will be signed, and the same policy will be written into it — an unsigned download that macOS calls damaged is a worse answer than no download.

Questions people actually ask

Where does my document go?

Nowhere. It is opened, read, changed and written in this tab, on your machine. We never see it — there is no server here to send it to, and the app is served with a Content-Security-Policy that only permits connections back to its own origin, so the browser physically refuses to let this page talk to anywhere else. Open your network tab and edit something; you will watch nothing leave.

Will it look like the rest of my document?

Yes, because it is the same font. PDFMod writes your replacement using the font already embedded in your file, at the size the line is already set in. It will not swap in a lookalike to get the job done — a substituted font is 5% out on width on average and 20% at worst, which is a visibly different word in a paragraph that otherwise matches.

What happens if a letter I type isn’t in the file’s font?

You are told the moment you type it, and told which letter. Most PDFs embed only the characters they actually use — a contract containing “Hello” may have no W in it anywhere. So instead of quietly drawing something else, PDFMod says “this font was subset to 51 glyphs and Q is not one of them” and stops. Annoying, and much better than one word in a different typeface in a document you have already sent.

Does the rest of the paragraph move?

The lines stay put; the words inside them move. If your replacement is longer or shorter, PDFMod works out where the paragraph's lines should now break and rewrites each line where that line already sits — so nothing slides down the page and nothing below the paragraph shifts. But a word at the end of line three can end up at the start of line four, which is what re-breaking means. You see every line it would rewrite, before and after, before it writes any of them.

What happens to a hyperlink or a form field on a line that re-breaks?

It stays exactly where it is, and PDFMod tells you so before you commit. A link in a PDF is not attached to the words it looks attached to — it is a rectangle on the page with a URL on it, and the same is true of a form field, a highlight and a sticky note. So when the words underneath move, it does not follow them, and it ends up over whatever now lands in that rectangle. Before you press the button, PDFMod checks the page's real list of them, names the ones your change would strand and quotes the words each is sitting on today. It will not quietly drag them to where the words probably went — that is guesswork, and a phrase that re-breaks across two lines is not one rectangle any more. A same-length replacement moves no words and strands nothing.

Are there PDFs it won't edit?

No. Every line on every page takes a change. What varies is how the change is made and what that costs, and PDFMod tells you before you commit to it. Where it can rewrite the page's own bytes, your document keeps its font, its spacing and its text layer exactly. Where it cannot — a Type 3 font, a character the embedded subset does not contain, a table cell whose column must not move, text inside a reusable block — it takes the old words off and draws the new ones over the same spot, in your document's own letterforms wherever they hold the characters. Then it names every way that differs from a clean rewrite: the typeface, the width, the size, any character no font in the file could draw. You see it against a preview, and you can undo it.

My PDF is a scan. Can I edit it?

Not until it has text in it. A scan is a photograph of a page — there are no words in the file to change. Run it through OCR first, which is in this app and also runs on your machine, and the recognised words become real text you can edit.

Can I edit a form field, or a comment?

No, and deliberately. The words in a form field live twice — once as the field's value, once as pixels in its appearance stream — and changing one of those makes the document disagree with itself. That is a different job and it is not this one.

Need something else? All of PDFMod’s tools work the same way: on your machine, and we never see your files.