Edit PDF Online Free: Add Images, Shapes and Text

To add an image to a PDF, pick the image tool and choose a JPG, PNG or WebP file. It lands on the page you are looking at, and you can drag it into place and resize it. That covers most of what people use images for in a PDF, such as a logo on a letterhead or a scanned signature at the bottom of a contract.

The shapes are rectangles, circles and ellipses, and straight lines. The pen draws freehand, which is handy for circling a figure or writing a quick mark by hand, and the highlighter lays a see-through color over text so the words still show. A text box puts new words anywhere on the page, for filling in a form that has no fields or leaving a note in the margin.

What you add sits on top of the page. The original content underneath is left alone, so the rest of the document keeps its text and links at the original quality. The one exception is permanent removal of covered content, explained below, which changes the pages it applies to.

You can change words that are already in the PDF. Click a line of text and type the new version. When you save, the old line is covered and your text is drawn in its place, on the same baseline and at the same size. It is built for small fixes, like a wrong date or a misspelled name.

The new line will not be in the exact original font. Fonts inside a PDF are usually cut down to the letters the document used, so they cannot spell new words. The editor picks the closest standard font, Helvetica, Times or Courier, and draws your text in that. In most documents a corrected line passes without notice, but put it next to the line above and the letter shapes differ a little.

This version only edits Latin-script text, one line at a time. Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and other scripts cannot be edited yet. The paragraph does not reflow, so a replacement much longer than the original can run past where the old line ended. The original words also stay in the file under the new line, and someone copying text from the page may still pick them up. If the old wording must not survive, cover it and keep permanent removal on. For anything bigger than a line or two, converting with PDF to Word and editing there is the better route.

A white rectangle over the words is the usual way to white out a PDF, and the cover shapes do exactly that. They come in white for a clean-looking page, or in any other color, black included, if you want it obvious that something was taken out.

A cover on its own only hides content from view. The text is still in the file under the shape, and anyone can select it, copy it or find it with a search. Redacted court filings have leaked this way more than once: a black box on the page, and the words still sitting in the file under it.

To remove confidential text from a PDF properly, leave "Permanently remove content under covers" ticked. It switches on by default as soon as the document has a cover. Each page with a cover is then saved as an image with the cover burned in, so the hidden text is gone from the file. It cannot be selected or searched, and moving the box will not bring it back.

That costs something on those pages, and only on those pages. They can no longer be searched or have text copied from them, links and form fields on them stop working, and the file gets bigger. Pages without a cover are saved as they were. If you need a flattened page to be searchable again, OCR PDF can read the visible text back in, and the covered part stays a blank box.

Sanitizing a PDF before you share it usually goes further than the page. Check the document properties for an author or company name, and look for comments and attachments. A cover deals with what is printed on the page, not with what travels alongside it.

Plenty of online PDF editors need no download but still upload your file and do the work on their servers. This one opens and edits the document in your browser, so a normal PDF is not sent anywhere. That matters for the files people most often need to change, like a contract with a wrong date or a statement with an account number to hide.

The exception is a PDF with editing restrictions: it opens normally, but an owner password blocks changes. The editor cannot save changes to those as they are, so it offers to send the file to our server once to remove the restriction. That copy is deleted within an hour, like every upload on CocoPDF, and the editing itself still happens on your device. A PDF that asks for a password before it will open is different. Unlock it first with Unlock PDF, using the password you have, then open the unlocked copy here.

Because your device does the work, it also sets the speed. Files under about 100 MB work well. Past that, a phone or an older laptop can run short of memory, and a long document with many covered pages takes longer to save, since each of those pages is turned into an image one at a time.