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.

What it refuses, and why

A PDF has no paragraphs. It has glyphs at coordinates, and every line and paragraph in this tool is inferred from where those glyphs sit. Sometimes that inference is not safe, and the only honest answer is no. Lines PDFMod will not touch are hatched on the page before you click them, and clicking one tells you which of these it is:

• A character the font hasn’t got. Most PDFs embed only the letters they actually use. You are told which character, and how many the font has, as you type it.
• Justified text. The spacing that makes both margins line up is baked into the file word by word. Same-length replacements are fine; re-breaking the paragraph is not, so it is refused. A lot of contracts and academic papers are like this.
• Tables and columns. Moving a cell moves the column, and a second column is not the continuation of the first. Neither re-breaks.
• Line breaks it cannot reproduce. Before PDFMod is allowed to choose new line breaks for a paragraph, it has to reproduce the paragraph’s existing ones from the same rules. If it cannot, it will not re-break — because a breaker that disagrees with your document would rearrange text you never touched.
• Scans, and fonts it cannot write with. A scan has no text to change — send it through OCR first. A Type 3 font is a set of little drawings rather than a font, and some LaTeX CVs are built entirely from them. A Type 1 font — still common in older academic papers — PDFMod cannot yet read well enough to be sure which characters it holds, so it will not write with it. And a font the file only names, rather than carrying, could be drawn differently on the next machine.
• Signed, XFA and password-protected files. Any change voids a digital signature. An XFA form’s real content is in an XML packet, so editing what you can see would change the picture and not the data. And a password-protected file would come back without its password, which is not what anyone means by “edit” — take it off with Unlock first and put it back afterwards.

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. Measured on the first page of a spread of real documents: a Word 365 letter offered every line and 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 and a LaTeX CV set in Type 3 fonts offered nothing at all, and a signed invoice was turned away at the door. That is the shape of it — good on documents that came out of a word processor, thin 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.

Why does it refuse so much?

Because a PDF has no paragraphs. It has positioned glyphs, and lines and paragraphs have to be inferred from where those glyphs sit. Where the inference is not safe, PDFMod refuses and says which of these it hit: justified text with the spacing baked in, a table, side-by-side columns, a scanned page, a font it cannot write with. It will still take a same-length replacement in most of those cases. What it will not do is guess and hand you a document that looks fine and is wrong.

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.