Edit a PDF in your browser
Add text, draw, sign, highlight, insert shapes and reorder pages free — no signup, no watermark. The document opens in your browser and is never uploaded.
Open a PDF to start editing
It opens in this tab. The file is never uploaded.
How it works
The document is opened with pdf.js, Mozilla's PDF engine, which renders each page to a canvas and reconstructs a text layer and an annotation layer above it. Text boxes, freehand ink, highlights, stamps and signatures are created through pdf.js's own annotation editor, so they are saved as real PDF annotation objects rather than being painted into the page. Shapes, page reordering and rotation are applied afterwards with pdf-lib, which rewrites the document's object tree directly. Nothing is rasterised unless you ask for a redaction, and nothing is uploaded at any point.
What to watch out for
A PDF stores positioned glyphs and the font program that draws them, not editable paragraphs, and no permissively licensed library reflows that. What the cover-and-retype tool does is put an opaque rectangle over the old text and a new text box on top. It looks right and it prints right, but the original characters are still in the file and can still be extracted.
A black rectangle drawn over a name hides nothing — the name stays in the content stream and any other reader will select it straight out from underneath. So redacting renders that page to an image, paints the black areas onto the image, and replaces the page with it. The content is genuinely gone, at the cost of the page's text no longer being selectable and the file getting larger.
If the PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, every page is a photograph. You can still annotate, sign, draw on it and reorder the pages, but there is no text layer to select, search or cover precisely, because none was ever recorded. Running it through optical character recognition first is the only thing that changes that.
Every page you scroll to is rendered in this tab, which means memory here is your machine's memory. A few hundred pages is comfortable on a laptop; a thousand-page scanned file on an older phone is not. There is no page cap and no file-size cap imposed from our side, so the honest answer is that the ceiling is whatever your hardware can hold.
If the document already contains an AcroForm, its fields are interactive here and the values you type are written back into the file properly. Building a new form — adding checkboxes and text fields that another program will recognise as fillable — is a different job and this editor does not do it.
Limits
Files up to about 100 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.
What this editor actually is
Most things called a PDF editor online are an upload form attached to a server that does the work somewhere else. That is why they have page limits, size caps, a watermark on the result and an account to create: each of those exists to recover the cost of moving your document across the internet twice and processing it on somebody’s hardware.
This one runs in the tab you are reading. The document is opened, rendered, edited and written entirely by your own browser, which is why there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. It also means a contract, a medical letter or a bank statement can be marked up without a copy of it existing anywhere but on your own machine.
What you can do to a page
Write on it. Add a text box anywhere, choose the size and typeface, and type. The text is stored as a real PDF annotation, so it stays sharp at any zoom and can be selected and searched in other readers.
Draw and sign. Freehand ink for a signature or a scribbled correction, with the stroke smoothed as you draw. A signature can be drawn once and placed on as many pages as you need.
Highlight. Either by selecting real text, in which case the highlight follows the words as they wrap, or by dragging a free rectangle over anything at all — including a scan, where there is no text to select.
Add shapes. Rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows, with their own stroke colour, fill, thickness and opacity. Objects can be aligned to each other, stacked in front of or behind one another, and copied between pages.
Insert a picture. A logo, a stamp, a photograph of a signed page. It is embedded as an image object rather than flattened into the page.
Fill in a form. If the document has fillable fields, they work here and what you type is written back into the file as a field value, not drawn on top of it.
What you can do to the document
The page rail down the side is the whole document. Drag a thumbnail to move a page, rotate one or several, delete pages, duplicate them, or insert pages from another PDF or from an image. You can also select a handful of pages and save only those, which is the same operation as splitting the file.
Nothing is committed until you save. Every one of these steps can be undone, and the undo history covers annotations and page operations in the order you did them, rather than keeping two separate stacks that disagree about what happened last.
Redaction, and why it works the way it does
Covering something with a black box is the most common way people accidentally publish the thing they were trying to hide. The rectangle is drawn on top; the text underneath is untouched, still in the file, still selectable, still extractable by anybody who opens the document in a different reader.
So this editor does not offer that. Marking an area for redaction rasterises the whole page: the page is rendered to an image, the marked areas are painted out of the image, and the page is replaced. The information is destroyed rather than hidden. The trade-off is real and is stated before you commit to it — text on that page stops being selectable, and the file grows, because a picture of a page is larger than the instructions to draw one.
Nothing is uploaded
Open your browser’s network panel before you start and watch it while you work. Two things are fetched, both from this site: the editor’s own code and the PDF rendering engine. Your document is not among them, because it is never sent anywhere. Turn the connection off after the page has loaded and everything on this page still works.
That is also the reason there is no “your file will be deleted after an hour” promise here. There is nothing to delete.
Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-05.
Next step
Your file is already here in this browser, so the next tool starts with it loaded.
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