PDF Editor Online — Highlight, Sign, Annotate & Save in Place
Free browser-based PDF editor with tablet mode, autosave, and save-in-place. Highlight like a real marker, sign, whiteout, draw, add text and images. No upload, no sign up, no watermark — your file stays on your device.
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About PDF Editor Online — Highlight, Sign, Annotate & Save in Place
Edit PDFs entirely in your browser — no upload, no account, no watermarks. Highlight text with a real-marker style highlighter (six colors, no opacity build-up on overlap), sign with a drawn, typed, or uploaded signature, whiteout sensitive areas, draw freehand, add text in standard PDF fonts, insert images, and reorganise pages (delete, rotate, duplicate, reorder, insert blank). Merge multiple PDFs in one editor session via File → Add Files, then drag pages from any source into any position; right-click any page to export it as a standalone PDF for splitting. Save in place overwrites the original file via the File System Access API, autosave can write changes every couple of seconds, and highlights and drawings are saved as PDF Ink annotations so they're still editable when the file is reopened. Tablet mode hides everything except a compact toolbar and uses single-finger draw / two-finger swipe gestures, so the same workspace doubles as a reader for long documents on touch screens.
What Is an Online PDF Editor?
An online PDF editor lets you modify PDF documents directly in your web browser without installing any software. Unlike simple annotation tools that only allow freehand drawing, a full PDF editor supports adding formatted text, inserting images, and drawing on any page. Edits are embedded into the PDF structure so the resulting file can be viewed in any PDF reader. This tool processes everything client-side using JavaScript, so your documents remain private and are never uploaded to a remote server.
How to Use This Tool
Start by uploading a PDF file. The editor displays each page with four editing modes: Draw for freehand strokes, Text for placing editable text boxes, Image for inserting pictures, and Select for repositioning or resizing elements. Switch between modes using the toolbar at the top. In Draw mode, choose a pen color and width, then draw directly on the page. In Text mode, click anywhere on the page to place a text box and type your content. In Image mode, upload an image file to insert it onto the current page. Use Select mode to drag elements to a new position, resize images, or delete items. When finished, click Save to generate the edited PDF and download it.
Adding Text to PDFs
The text editor supports six standard PDF fonts: Helvetica, Helvetica Bold, Times Roman, Times Bold, Courier, and Courier Bold. You can set the font size from 6 to 120 points and choose any color using the color picker. Text boxes are placed exactly where you click on the page and can be repositioned later in Select mode. Multi-line text is supported — simply press Enter within a text box. The text is rendered using PDF standard fonts, ensuring consistent appearance across all PDF viewers without embedding external font files.
Inserting Images into PDFs
You can insert PNG, JPEG, or WebP images into any page of your PDF. Uploaded images are placed at a default size of 30 percent of the page width with the aspect ratio preserved. Switch to Select mode to drag the image to the desired position or resize it using the corner handle. Images are embedded directly into the PDF file structure, so the resulting document is fully self-contained. This is useful for adding logos, signatures, photos, diagrams, or watermarks to existing documents.
Privacy and Security
This PDF editor runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript libraries. Your PDF files and images are never uploaded to any server. All rendering, editing, and PDF generation happen locally on your device. This makes the tool suitable for editing sensitive documents such as contracts, financial records, and personal files. Once you close or refresh the page, all data is discarded from browser memory. For maximum privacy, you can use this tool offline after the page has loaded.
How to Sign a PDF Online (Draw, Type, or Upload Your Signature)
Signing a PDF in your browser takes seconds with this editor, and you have three ways to create a signature depending on what looks closest to your real handwriting. The first option is to draw your signature directly in the signature pad using a mouse, trackpad, touchscreen, or stylus. A stylus on a tablet produces the smoothest result and the closest match to a pen-on-paper signature, but a careful trackpad signature is usually good enough for everyday contracts, NDAs, and consent forms. The second option is to type your name and pick a cursive script font — the editor renders the typed text as a signature image, which is convenient when you need a clean, readable mark and do not have a stylus handy. The third option is to upload an existing signature image. For this method, a PNG with a transparent background works best, because anything else will paste a visible white rectangle on top of the underlying PDF text. If you only have a JPEG, you can run it through a background remover first or scan a fresh signature on a plain white page and convert it to PNG. Once you have created a signature, the editor offers a Save signature for reuse option that stores the signature in your browser's localStorage so you do not have to redraw it every time you sign a document. The saved signature lives on your device — it is never uploaded to a server, never associated with an account, and is cleared the moment you clear your browser data or use a private window. After inserting a signature you can drag it anywhere on the page and resize it to match the signature line in the document. Compared with DocuSign-style services that require an account, store your signature on their servers, and often paywall basic signing, doing this in a browser-only tool keeps the entire workflow private and free.
How to Delete, Reorder, Rotate, Duplicate, and Insert Pages in a PDF
Page operations are handled through the page sidebar on the left side of the editor. Each thumbnail in the sidebar represents a page in the working document, and right-clicking a thumbnail opens a context menu that surfaces every page operation supported by the editor. Delete removes the selected page from the document — useful when a scanner produced a blank trailing page or when you want to send only a subset of a longer report. Duplicate creates an exact copy of the page directly after the original, including a deep copy of every annotation, text overlay, image, signature, and shape on it, so you can iterate on a layout without losing the version you started with. Rotate cycles the page in 90-degree increments — 90, 180, or 270 degrees — which is the fastest way to fix a page that was scanned upside down or sideways. Reordering is done by dragging a thumbnail up or down in the sidebar; the editor renumbers everything automatically, and the new order is reflected in the saved PDF. Insert blank page adds a fresh empty page above the current page, below it, or at the very end of the document, which is handy when you need to add a cover sheet, a separator, or extra room for signatures. Every page operation is recorded on the global undo and redo stack, so you can reverse a delete, walk back a reorder, or undo several rotations at once with a single keystroke. None of these changes are committed to the output PDF until you click Save — until that point your edits are previewed inside the editor without modifying the source file, so you can experiment freely and only download the finished version when you are happy with it. If your goal is to combine several PDFs first or to split out a single section, our merge-pdf, split-pdf, and rotate-pdf tools at /tools/merge-pdf, /tools/split-pdf, and /tools/rotate-pdf are dedicated single-purpose alternatives.
Whiteout vs. True Redaction — What to Use and When
It is important to understand the difference between whiteout and redaction before you use this tool to hide sensitive information. The whiteout tool draws an opaque rectangle on top of the page that visually covers whatever sits underneath it. The default fill color is white so that whited-out areas blend into a typical page, but the color is configurable, which means you can also drop a black bar over a passage to produce the classic censored-document look. What this tool does not do is remove the underlying text or image data from the PDF. The original content is still present in the file's content stream, just hidden behind the rectangle. Anyone who opens the PDF and runs Select All followed by Copy, or who uses a text-extraction utility like pdftotext or a PDF parser library, can pull out everything that was supposedly hidden. For visual edits this is fine — cleaning up a stray watermark, blanking out an old logo, or hiding a section before reusing a template. For legal redaction of sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, names in court filings, medical record identifiers, or anything subject to a privacy law, whiteout is not safe. The reliable way to redact in a browser-only workflow is to flatten the PDF to images first using our PDF to Image tool at /tools/pdf-to-image at a high DPI such as 300 or 600, then optionally re-assemble the images into a fresh PDF using our Image to PDF tool at /tools/image-to-pdf. Because images contain only pixels, the redacted text simply does not exist in the resulting file — there is no hidden layer for an adversary to pull back. To repeat the warning plainly: the whiteout tool is designed for visual editing, and it is NOT suitable for hiding data from a determined adversary. If the consequence of someone recovering the hidden content matters, flatten to images instead.
Highlight, Whiteout, and Annotate — Choosing the Right Tool
The editor offers several overlapping ways to mark up a PDF, and picking the right one keeps your output looking intentional. Use the highlight tool when you want to draw attention to a passage without obscuring it, exactly the way a paper highlighter works. Highlight strokes are translucent yellow rectangles, so the underlying text stays fully readable through the color — this is the right choice for marking key sentences in a contract, calling out a deadline in a memo, or flagging answers in a study sheet. Use the whiteout tool when the goal is to cover content rather than emphasize it, for example to blank a section of a form before reusing the template, to hide an old letterhead, or to remove a watermark. Whiteout produces an opaque rectangle in whatever color you choose, and as discussed in the redaction section above, it covers content visually but does not delete the underlying data. Use the freehand draw tool when you need a shape the rectangle tools cannot make — circling a paragraph, drawing an arrow toward a figure, sketching a quick correction mark, or producing a signature directly as ink strokes on the page. Use the text overlay tool when you want a typed comment that other readers can clearly see, such as a callout, a date, a printed name, or a value typed into a flat-form field that has no real form widget behind it. All four tools produce overlays that you can reposition and resize in Select mode at any point before saving, and all four flatten into the saved PDF when you click Save, which means anyone opening the file in any viewer — Acrobat, Preview, a browser PDF viewer, a phone PDF reader — sees your edits exactly as you placed them. If you want a dedicated annotation-only experience without the rest of the editor, our annotate-pdf tool at /tools/annotate-pdf focuses on highlights, freehand strokes, and notes.
Tablet Mode — Read and Annotate PDFs Like a Real Notebook
Tablet mode turns the editor into a focused reading workspace optimised for touch screens — useful on iPad, Android tablets, Surface devices, and Chromebooks. Toggle it from the toolbar and the editor jumps to fullscreen, hides the menubar and side panels, and replaces the main toolbar with a compact strip that carries Select, Draw, Highlight, Eraser, Save, and an Exit button. Gestures are split deliberately: a single finger drives the active tool, so when Highlight is selected you sweep a marker across text the same way you would on paper, and when Draw is selected you stroke ink onto the page directly. Two fingers — anywhere on the page — turn pages, the same gesture you'd use to flip a real book. Page-turn snaps after you cross 20% of the page width, so quick flicks browse through long documents without long swipes. The status bar still shows the dirty indicator and the last save time, so you can see at a glance whether your latest highlights have been written to disk. To go back to the full editor, tap Exit tablet — your previous panel layout is restored exactly as it was before you entered tablet mode.
Save in Place and Autosave — Editing PDFs Without Losing Work
On Chromium-based browsers — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi — opening a file via the Open button uses the File System Access API, which gives the editor a writable handle to the file you picked. Save then overwrites the original file directly, with no Save As prompt and no download dialog. The first save shows a one-time browser permission prompt asking you to allow writing; after that, every save is silent. If the file came in via drag-and-drop or the legacy file picker, Save falls back to a one-time Save As prompt where you choose a target, and from then on saves go to that target silently. Firefox and Safari don't yet expose the File System Access API, so on those browsers Save downloads a new file with the same name as the original — you can drop it back into place in your file manager. Autosave is a separate per-file toggle in the File menu: when enabled, every edit triggers a debounced write 2 seconds later, so you never have to remember to Save manually. Autosave preserves the same in-place semantics on Chromium and falls back to download on others. The status bar surfaces the last save timestamp so you can verify saves are landing.
Editable Annotations on Reopen — Round-Trip with PDF Ink Annotations
Most online PDF editors flatten your highlights and drawings into the page when you save, which means reopening the file shows the annotations as part of the page bitmap and you can no longer edit or remove them. This editor stores drawings and highlighter strokes as PDF Ink annotations instead — a standard PDF object type that any PDF viewer renders correctly and that this editor reads back as editable strokes when you reopen the file. Practically that means you can highlight a contract on Monday, save it, send the file to a colleague who reads it in Acrobat or the Chrome PDF viewer (they see your highlights), and then reopen the file in this editor on Wednesday and erase or recolour any highlight you no longer agree with. The eraser works on annotations from previous sessions, not just ones you just drew. Color, opacity, and stroke width all round-trip — the eraser in this editor uses point-to-segment hit-testing so it catches strokes anywhere along their visible length, not just at the sampled points. Other annotation types (text, images, signatures, whiteout) are still flattened in this iteration; that's planned for a future release.
Highlighter That Behaves Like a Real Marker (Not a Freehand Box)
Most browser-based PDF editors implement highlighting as a click-and-drag rectangle: you draw a box, it fills with translucent yellow, and that's a highlight. That's fine for highlighting whole paragraphs but unnatural for marking specific phrases, underlining a single line, or drawing a marker stroke that follows curved or hand-written text. This editor's highlighter is a real marker: drag your pointer (or finger in tablet mode) and a thick translucent stroke follows the path you draw, with rounded caps and consistent opacity. Six color swatches are available — yellow, green, blue, pink, orange, purple — picked from a popover anchored to the highlighter button in the toolbar. Overlapping highlight strokes don't compound into a darker stripe the way naive translucent painting would: same-color overlaps render at the configured opacity, just like a paper highlighter that doesn't get darker on the second pass.
Flattening, Hyperlinks, and Bates Numbering for Final PDFs
Once a PDF is ready to circulate, three small features in the editor turn an editable working draft into a final deliverable. Save as Flattened lives in the File menu and produces a separate copy of the document where drawings and highlighter strokes are baked into the page content stream instead of stored as editable PDF Ink annotations. The flattened copy looks identical to what you see in the editor, but reopening it (in this editor or in Acrobat) no longer lets anyone erase or move those marks — useful for sending out a signed contract, a marked-up review, or a final draft where the annotations should be visually permanent. The original document state in the editor is unchanged, so you can keep the editable version locally and circulate the flattened version. Hyperlinks make any rectangle on the page clickable in a PDF viewer. Pick the Link tool from the toolbar (or press L), drag the rectangle that should be clickable, and a small dialog asks for the target — either an external URL (https://, mailto:, tel: are all accepted; bare domains get https:// added automatically) or another page in the same document. The editor shows a dashed blue rectangle in the working view so you can see where the links are; the saved PDF emits a standard PDF Link annotation with no visible border, exactly like links in Word-exported or Acrobat-authored documents. To edit a link's target later, select it in Select mode and click Edit target… in the right-hand properties panel. Bates numbering is built into the Headers & Footers dialog — turn on the Bates section, set the prefix (e.g. EX-, LEG-, ACME-), the digit count (typically 5 or 6 for a few thousand pages, 4 for under a thousand), an optional suffix, and the starting number, then insert the {bates} token into any of the six header / footer slots. The most common arrangement puts the Bates value alone in the bottom-center slot, giving every exhibit page a sequential number across a deposition or production set. You can mix Bates with page-of-total numbering ({bates} · Page {n} of {total}), scope it to a page range (cover page excluded by setting Page range to 2- and starting at 1), and Bates numbering respects the same page-range parser as the rest of the headers / footers config so you don't have to learn anything new. All three features run client-side: the flattened file, the hyperlinks, and the Bates numbers are emitted entirely in your browser when you save — none of them require uploading the document anywhere.
How to Watermark, Number, and Stamp Pages in a PDF
Stamping text or images onto every page of a PDF — a watermark, a page number, a Confidential header — is one of those tasks that pushes people onto Smallpdf or iLovePDF, both of which charge a subscription for it. This editor does both client-side. Insert → Watermark… opens a dialog with a Text tab and an Image tab. In Text mode you type the watermark string (default DRAFT), pick a font, size, color, opacity, and rotation. The classic diagonal watermark sits at –45° rotation with low opacity — that's the default. In Image mode you upload a PNG/JPEG/WebP logo and the modal places it centered on the page at the chosen fraction of the page width with the chosen opacity. Both modes accept a page-range string: the default "all" applies the watermark to every page; type "1-5, 8" to scope it to specific pages, or "odd" / "even" for skip-page-style placement. Insert → Headers & Footers… is built around a 3×2 grid of slots — top left, top center, top right, bottom left, bottom center, bottom right — each holding an optional template string. The templates support four tokens: {n} is the current page's number (you can override the starting value with the Start page number field, useful when the cover page should not count), {total} is the total page count, and {date} / {time} are the current locale date and time at the moment of save. Click any token chip to insert it at the caret in the focused slot. A common configuration is to put "Confidential" in the top-right slot and "Page {n} of {total}" in the bottom-center slot — that gives you a corporate-style document footer with no extra fields. Both modals show a live preview directly on the canvas, so you can read the watermark on the actual page background before you commit. When you click Apply, the configuration becomes part of the open document; saving bakes the stamps into the PDF page content stream — they are not stored as a separate editable layer, so on reopen the watermark looks like part of the page. To change a stamp later, reopen the modal and edit the same config, or click Remove watermark / Remove headers & footers to clear it. A note on legal use cases: a flattened watermark visually marks a document but does not prevent text extraction underneath — it is a visual deterrent, not a redaction. For redaction of sensitive information, flatten the page to images first via the PDF to Image tool, then reassemble with Image to PDF. Both run client-side as well.
How PDF Compression Works in the Browser
PDF files don't have a single 'compress' button hidden inside them — the file format is a container that stores text, vector graphics, fonts, and embedded images side by side. The text and vector parts are already compressed efficiently by the standard PDF encoding and don't get meaningfully smaller. What does shrink a PDF is reducing the size of its embedded images, which is exactly what File → Compress does. The editor walks every page's resource dictionary, finds every image XObject — the standardised PDF object that wraps an embedded JPEG, PNG, or scan — and decides whether it can be safely re-encoded. JPEG images compressed with the DCTDecode filter are decoded in the browser via createImageBitmap, drawn onto an off-screen canvas at a smaller pixel size, and re-encoded as a fresh JPEG at the quality you picked. The new bytes replace the original stream inside the PDF, so the saved file ends up with the same number of pages and the same layout, just with smaller image data living behind the page content. Three presets cover the common cases: Web (72 dpi, quality 60) produces the smallest file and is fine for emailing a contract or sharing on chat, Email (150 dpi, quality 75) is the balanced default for sending a document for review, and Print (200 dpi, quality 90) preserves enough detail for printing or for someone to zoom in on a chart without artefacts. Custom lets you slide DPI between 72 and 300 and quality between 40 and 95 if you want full control. Some images can't be safely round-tripped through canvas — CMYK-encoded prepress images, JPEG 2000 streams, JBIG2 fax compression, or images that have a soft alpha mask — so the editor lists them as 'will be left as-is' in the modal before you confirm. You can still apply compression to the other images and leave those untouched. Scanned PDFs typically shrink to 20–30% of their original size at the Email preset; PDFs that are mostly text won't shrink much because their bulk isn't in images to begin with. All compression happens client-side: nothing leaves the browser, the original file isn't modified until you click Save (or autosave runs), and Ctrl+Z reverts the compression with the original bytes intact.
How to Merge and Split PDFs Without Uploading Them Anywhere
Merging and splitting PDFs is built into this editor as a first-class workflow, not a separate tool you have to switch to. To merge files, open your first PDF the way you normally would — drag it onto the editor or use File → Open — and then go to File → Add Files (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+O on Windows / Linux, Cmd+Shift+O on macOS). The picker accepts multiple PDFs at once, so you can shift-click or ctrl-click several files in one go. Each picked file is loaded, its pages are appended to the end of the page sidebar, and the sidebar starts showing a small colored dot in the top-left of every thumbnail — one color per source file. Hover the dot to confirm which file a page came from. Once everything is loaded you can use the existing drag-to-reorder gesture in the sidebar to mix pages from any source into any position: drag page 4 from the second file in between pages 1 and 2 from the first file and that's the order the saved PDF will use. Annotations, signatures, highlights, and text overlays you add still belong to whichever specific page you placed them on, so they follow pages around the document as you reorder. When you click Save, every source file is loaded into pdf-lib in a single pass and emitted as one merged PDF — page content, fonts, and metadata are preserved from each source. Splitting is the reverse: right-click any page thumbnail in the sidebar and pick "Export pages as new PDF…". A standalone PDF containing just that page downloads to your machine. The open document is not modified — the export creates a copy — so you can keep editing the merged document immediately after splitting. The split file's name is derived from the original (for example, contracts-edited.pdf becomes contracts-edited-page-3.pdf), which keeps your downloads folder organised when you split several pages in a row. Because every step runs client-side, none of your PDFs leave the browser at any point — neither when merging, nor when splitting, nor when saving — which makes this workflow safe for contracts, NDAs, medical records, financial statements, or anything else that should not be uploaded to a third-party service.
Password Protection, Permissions, and Removing Passwords from PDFs
PDF files can be locked in two distinct ways and it's worth knowing the difference before you reach for either. An open password (sometimes called a user password) encrypts the whole document. Anyone trying to view, print, copy, or extract content from the file has to type the password first; without it, the file is mathematically unreadable. Permissions (sometimes called restrictions) are different: the file opens normally for everyone, but a flag inside the PDF tells compliant readers which actions to allow. Adobe Acrobat, Chromium's built-in PDF viewer, and macOS Preview honor those flags — they grey out the Print menu, disable text selection, refuse to save modifications. Permissions are designed to be enforced socially, not cryptographically: a command-line tool that ignores the flags can still extract everything, so use permissions for everyday document hygiene ("this is the final version, don't accidentally edit it") and an open password when the content is actually sensitive. File → Protect… in this editor supports all three cases. Add Password encrypts the document with the AES-256 algorithm (or AES-128 if you need compatibility with very old readers), prompts for an optional owner password that lets you change the permissions later, and writes the encrypted PDF back to the same file or a download. Set Permissions writes an encrypted-with-owner-only PDF with a permissions flag — checkbox each of printing, copying, modifying, annotating, form-filling, page assembly, accessibility, and high-resolution printing. Remove Password takes an encrypted PDF you have the password for and saves a decrypted copy. All three run entirely in your browser using the MuPDF engine compiled to WebAssembly. The WebAssembly module is downloaded on demand the first time you touch the Protect dialog, so it doesn't slow down the editor's initial load; subsequent operations are instant. When you open a file that's already password-protected, the editor detects the encryption automatically and asks for the password right away — once you provide it, the document loads exactly like an unprotected one and you can edit, save, or re-protect it via the same dialog.
Open EPUB Files Too — One Tool, Two Formats
The same drop zone that takes PDF files also accepts EPUB ebooks. Drop an .epub and the tool switches into reader mode: a chapter sidebar lists every part of the book, paginated content fills the centre column, a View menu controls font size and theme (light, sepia, dark), and your reading position is remembered per book in your browser's local storage so reopening the same file lands you exactly where you left off — even if you switch fonts or themes between sessions. The reader handles EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, reflowable and fixed-layout, using the same `epubjs` engine behind every major web ebook reader. DRM-protected ebooks (Kindle, Apple Books, anything wrapped with Adobe ADEPT) are not supported by design — bring DRM-free files only. Annotation and highlighting features for the EPUB side are planned follow-ups; right now EPUB is read-only while the PDF side has the full editor, drawing, signing, watermarking, and password protection toolset. The combined offering means one URL to bookmark for both formats; closing an EPUB returns you to the same empty state where you can drop a PDF next, and vice versa.
Sticky Notes — Inline Comments That Survive in Any PDF Reader
Sticky notes are the PDF format's built-in comment affordance: a small icon pinned to a page that, when clicked in any compliant reader, opens a popup containing the author's comment. They're the right tool when you want to leave feedback on a document for someone else — a reviewer marking up a contract, a teacher commenting on a student's report, an editor flagging a passage in a draft. Pick the Note tool from the toolbar or press N, click anywhere on the page, and a small popover opens with a textarea, six color swatches (yellow / green / blue / pink / orange / red — the standard PDF sticky-note palette), Save, Delete, and Cancel buttons. Save commits the note; Cancel discards it (and removes the icon if it was just created). Click an existing note to reopen the same popover and edit its text or color. Drag in select mode to move the icon. Delete in eraser mode or with the Delete key when the note is selected. The editor stores each note as a standard PDF /Text annotation when you save the document, so the notes show up identically in Adobe Acrobat, Foxit PDF Reader, macOS Preview, Chromium's built-in PDF viewer, and every other compliant reader — clicking the icon in any of them pops up your comment exactly as you wrote it. When you reopen a file in this editor, the editor reads those /Text annotations back so the notes appear as editable overlays again. The whole flow runs in your browser; the comments and the document never leave your device.
Draw Shapes — Rectangles, Ellipses, Lines, and Arrows
Marking up a PDF often calls for shapes that go beyond highlighter strokes — a rectangle around a critical paragraph, a circle around a figure, an arrow pointing from a comment to the section it references. The Shape tool covers all four primitives in one place. Pick the toolbar button or press O, choose the subtype (rectangle, ellipse, line, or arrow), set the stroke color and width, optionally pick a fill (rectangle and ellipse only), set the arrow-head placement (start, end, both, or none for lines and arrows), and drag on the page. Hold Shift to constrain rectangles to squares and ellipses to circles, or to snap lines and arrows to 15° angle increments. Shapes can be moved by dragging the body, resized by dragging corner handles (rectangles and ellipses) or endpoint handles (lines and arrows), and deleted with the eraser or by pressing Delete while selected. The right-side properties panel lets you change any styling on a selected shape after the fact, so you can iterate on a markup without redrawing. Save flattens the shapes into the PDF using the document's native drawing primitives — they appear identically in Acrobat, Preview, browser PDF viewers, and any other reader, with no special font or annotation engine required.
Browser & Device Support
The editor works in every modern browser. Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi) get the full feature set including Save in place, autosave, and round-trip Ink annotations through the File System Access API. Firefox and Safari work too — you can do all the editing, sign documents, highlight, and download the result — but Save acts as Save As (the browser doesn't yet support silent in-place writes). On iPad, iPhone, Android tablets, Surface, and Chromebooks, the editor is touch-aware: pinch-zoom is honoured and tablet mode separates single-finger drawing from two-finger page navigation. Stylus input (Apple Pencil, S Pen, Surface Pen) gets pressure-aware pointer events for smoother strokes. The application also runs offline once loaded — useful when working on confidential documents on air-gapped machines or in low-connectivity environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this PDF editor really free with no sign-up or watermarks?
Yes. The editor runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. There is no account, no email, no payment wall, no watermark on the saved file, and no usage limit. Your files never leave your device.
Can I edit a PDF on an iPad or Android tablet without an app?
Yes. Open the page in the device's browser, load a PDF, and toggle Tablet mode. The editor switches to a fullscreen reader-style layout where one finger draws or highlights and two fingers swipe pages. No app install, no upload, and the file stays on the device.
Does the editor save changes back to the original file?
On Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera) you can open a file via the File System Access API and Save will overwrite the original in place — no Save As dialog. On Firefox and Safari, Save downloads a new copy with the same filename. Autosave can also write every couple of seconds.
Will my highlights still be editable if I reopen the file?
Yes. Drawings and highlights are persisted as PDF Ink annotations rather than being baked into the page bitmap. When you reopen the file in this editor — or any other PDF reader — the annotations are still there, and in this editor they remain editable: you can erase them, change them, or add more.
Is whiteout a safe way to redact sensitive information?
No. Whiteout draws an opaque rectangle over the content, but the original text data is still present in the PDF and can be recovered with copy-paste or text-extraction tools. For real redaction, use the PDF to Image tool to flatten the page to pixels first, then convert back to PDF with Image to PDF.
Does the editor work offline?
Once the page has loaded in your browser, the editor continues to work offline — file rendering, editing, signing, and saving all happen client-side. This is useful for sensitive contracts, medical records, ID scans, and other documents you don't want to upload to a third party.
Can I merge multiple PDFs or split pages out as a new PDF?
Yes. Open your first PDF, then go to File → Add Files (or press Ctrl+Shift+O) to merge additional PDFs into the same editor session. Pages from every file appear in the sidebar — each tagged with a colored dot so you can tell them apart — and you can drag any page into any position. To split, right-click a page thumbnail in the sidebar and pick "Export pages as new PDF…" to download just that page as a standalone file. The merged document keeps editing as one, and the split export does not modify it.
Can I compress a PDF without uploading it anywhere?
Yes. Open the file, then go to File → Compress…. Pick a preset (Web, Email, or Print) or set your own DPI and JPEG quality. The editor re-encodes every embedded JPEG image at the chosen resolution and quality, replaces the image streams in place, and shows the saving before you apply it. Compression runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and you can press Ctrl+Z afterwards to revert if the result is too aggressive. The biggest savings come from scanned documents and photo-heavy PDFs; text-only PDFs are already small and the tool will say so.
Can I add a watermark or page numbers to a PDF in the browser?
Yes. Insert → Watermark… stamps text (any font, size, color, opacity, rotation) or an uploaded image across every page or a chosen range, all in the browser. Insert → Headers & Footers… lets you stamp text into any of six page corners — top L/C/R and bottom L/C/R — with tokens like {n} (page number), {total} (total pages), {date}, and {time} that get replaced per page. A live preview shows what each page will look like before you save. Both are flattened into the saved PDF — nothing is uploaded and no metadata leaks the watermark config.
How do I add Bates numbering, flatten annotations, or add hyperlinks?
Bates numbering lives inside Insert → Headers & Footers… — enable the Bates section, set your prefix (e.g. EX-), digit count, suffix, and starting number, then insert the {bates} token into any header / footer slot. Every page in the configured range gets its own zero-padded counter. Save as Flattened (File menu) writes a separate copy of the document where drawings and highlights are baked into the page content stream — useful when sending a final version that shouldn't be edited or have annotations erased. Hyperlinks: pick the Link tool in the toolbar (or press L), drag a rectangle on the page, and the editor asks for either an external URL (https://, mailto:, tel:) or a target page number for internal jumps. The saved PDF carries a real PDF Link annotation so the rectangle is clickable in any viewer.
Can I password-protect a PDF or restrict who can edit / print it?
Yes. File → Protect… (or Ctrl+Shift+P) lets you add an open password to encrypt the document with AES-256, set an owner password plus a granular permissions list (allow / disallow printing, copying, modifying, annotating, form-filling, accessibility, assembly), or remove an existing password when you know it. The editor will also prompt for the password when you open an encrypted PDF, decrypt it client-side, and let you edit normally. All cryptography runs in your browser using the MuPDF engine compiled to WebAssembly — your passwords and document content never leave your device. Open passwords are strong encryption (AES-256 by default, AES-128 available for older readers). Permissions are advisory: Acrobat, Chromium's PDF viewer, and Preview enforce them, but command-line tools can ignore them — use an open password if you need real confidentiality.
Can this tool open EPUB files too?
Yes. Drop an .epub file onto the editor (or pick one via File → Open) and the tool switches into ebook-reader mode — chapter sidebar, paginated content, three reading themes (light / sepia / dark), font-size slider, and resume-where-you-left-off per book. Drop a PDF afterwards and it switches back to the PDF editor. One tool, two formats, all client-side. Annotation and highlight features for EPUB are coming in a future release; for now the EPUB side is read-only.
Can I add comments or sticky notes to a PDF that other readers will see?
Yes. Pick the Note tool (toolbar icon or press N), click anywhere on a page, and a popover opens for you to type your comment and choose a color. The note saves as a standard PDF /Text annotation, so anyone opening the file in Acrobat, Foxit, Preview, Chromium's PDF viewer, or any other compliant reader sees a clickable note icon that pops up your comment. Reopening the file in this editor brings the notes back as editable overlays so you can update the text, change the color, move them, or delete them. All client-side — no upload.
Can I draw shapes on a PDF — rectangles, circles, arrows?
Yes. Pick the Shape tool (toolbar icon or press O) and choose a subtype: rectangle, ellipse, line, or arrow. Set stroke color, stroke width, fill, and arrow-head placement in the popover, then drag on the page to draw. Hold Shift while dragging a rectangle or ellipse to constrain to a square or circle; hold Shift while drawing a line or arrow to snap to 15° angles. Shapes are flattened into the saved PDF using standard PDF drawing primitives so they appear identically in any reader.
Can I save my highlights as text — for example to export PDF or EPUB highlights into a notes file?
Yes. For PDFs, highlight passages with the marker tool, then File → Export highlights as Markdown. The editor walks every page, extracts the text under each highlight rectangle (handling rotated pages too), and saves a .md file grouped by page. For EPUBs, drag-select text in the reader and click the floating Highlight button — yellow highlights persist across sessions per book. File → Export highlights as Markdown writes them out grouped by chapter. Both run entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
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