Adobe Acrobat charges $25 a month. Most people only need to edit a PDF occasionally. This guide shows you how to do everything Acrobat offers for common editing tasks — for free, without installing anything, and without uploading your files to a server.
Opening a PDF for editing
Open the PDF Editor and either drag your PDF onto the upload area or click to browse for it. The document renders page by page — large files may take a few seconds to load. Once loaded, every page appears in a scrollable canvas and all editing tools are immediately available in the sidebar.
Your file never leaves your browser. Processing is entirely local, which makes the editor safe for sensitive documents like contracts, financial statements, and HR files.
Adding and formatting text
Select the Text tool (T) from the left sidebar and click anywhere on the page to place a text box. Start typing immediately.
The properties panel on the right gives you full control over the appearance:
- Font family — choose from Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier, Georgia, Arial, Verdana, and Trebuchet MS.
- Font size — type a value or use the + / − buttons. Range is 6pt to 120pt.
- Bold, italic, underline — toggle formatting buttons individually.
- Colour — pick from preset swatches or use the custom colour picker for any hex colour.
- Opacity — adjust from 10% to 100% for watermark-style or ghosted text.
Text boxes resize automatically as you type. You can drag them to any position using the select tool (↖), or resize them with the orange corner handle.
Annotating — highlights, shapes, arrows
Annotations are used to mark up documents for review — highlighting key passages, drawing attention to data, or flagging sections that need attention.
Highlight tool
Select the highlight tool (🖊) and drag across any area of text or content to create a coloured highlight overlay. Choose from yellow, green, blue, pink, and purple in the properties panel. Adjust opacity to control how strongly the colour shows through.
Rectangle and ellipse
Use the rectangle (▭) and ellipse (⬭) tools to draw shapes. Control stroke colour, stroke width (2, 4, 6, or 10px), fill colour, and opacity. These are ideal for circling specific numbers in a report or boxing important paragraphs.
Arrow tool
The arrow (↗) tool draws a horizontal arrow that can be resized and repositioned. Use it to point to specific areas of a document — useful in technical reviews and feedback rounds.
Freehand drawing and markup
The freehand draw tool (✏️) lets you draw anything with your mouse, trackpad, or touchscreen. This is particularly powerful on tablets and touch devices where you can sketch diagrams, write notes, or circle content naturally.
Before drawing, set your stroke colour, width, and opacity in the properties panel. Each stroke is saved as a movable, resizable annotation — so you can reposition a drawing after placing it using the select tool.
Filling form fields
When you open a PDF that contains form fields — text inputs, checkboxes, dropdowns — the editor detects them automatically. Switch to the Form Fill mode (📋) in the sidebar and all fields are highlighted in orange, showing you exactly where to click and type.
This works for government forms, HR documents, insurance paperwork, application forms, and any other PDF that was created with interactive fields. Type into text fields, check checkboxes, and export the filled form as a regular PDF.
Inserting images
Click the image tool (🖼) in the sidebar to open a file picker. Select any JPG or PNG image from your device — your company logo, a signature photo, a chart, a stamp image, or any other graphic. The image is placed on the current page and can be moved and resized freely with the drag handles.
This is the recommended method for adding a handwritten signature to a document — photograph your signature, crop it tightly, and insert it onto the signature line.
Exporting the edited PDF
When you are finished editing, click Export PDF in the top-right corner. The editor bakes all your annotations, text, drawings, and form field data into the actual PDF file and triggers an immediate download. The exported file is named originalname_edited.pdf and is ready to send, archive, or process further.
After exporting, you can run the file through other PDFflow tools — compress it to reduce size, protect it with a password, add page numbers, or merge it with other documents.
What browser editors cannot do
Browser-based PDF editors are powerful, but there are things that genuinely require server-side tools or desktop software:
- Rewriting existing text in the PDF: This requires destructively parsing the PDF's internal text encoding — something that cannot be done reliably in a browser. You can add new text on top of existing text, but you cannot delete or modify existing paragraphs.
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Converting scanned images of text into selectable, searchable text requires a specialised OCR engine — not available in browser tools.
- Legally certified digital signatures: Certificate-backed signatures with cryptographic validity require a server-side PKI infrastructure (DocuSign, Adobe Sign, etc.).
For everything else — text annotation, highlighting, drawing, shapes, forms, images, and exporting — the PDFflow editor handles it completely without any software or subscription.