How to Edit a PDF

If you’ve ever tried to edit a Portable Document File, or PDF, you’ve almost certainly discovered that it’s a lot more trouble than editing a Microsoft Office document. That’s because the PDF format was never designed to be edited at all. When Adobe introduced the PDF spec back in 1993, the whole idea was that you could work with PDF documents on screen the same way you worked with documents on paper. A PDF was supposed to be a virtual printout, the on-screen equivalent of hard copy. Like any printed hard copy, it wasn’t intended to be changed.

It didn’t take long before users wanted to correct typos, replace old product logos with new ones, and even change fonts and layouts in their PDFs. Thus, productivity software makers started providing PDF editing tools. Even with these tools, you still can’t edit a PDF with the same ease and flexibility as say, a Word document or Google Doc, and you probably never will. Don’t worry, though. You can edit PDFs, and we tell you how. 

But first, it helps to understand challenges you’re up against.

Why Are PDF Files So Hard to Edit?

The PDF format was devised before everyone started using web browsers and is based on the printed page. That means you can’t add a few lines of text in the middle of a page one, for example, and make the remaining text flow smoothly into page two, as you can in a word processor. Instead, you need to resize the fonts on page one or change the size of the box that contains the text. If you want to add more text than will fit on the page, we offer some tips in a later section, but don’t expect perfect results.

While many apps call themselves PDF editors, they can’t actually edit the text and graphics in a PDF file. They only let you add comments to the PDF file—either boxed Post-It-style notes or lines and text boxes that appear on a layer above the PDF’s actual contents. When you add a comment to a PDF, it’s akin to putting a piece of paper under a pane of glass and writing comments on the glass. You can’t make any permanent changes to the text, such as removing sensitive data, and anyone using a free PDF viewer like Adobe Acrobat Reader(Opens in a new window) or the Preview on macOS can change or remove the comments you make. With that in mind, we detail a roundabout way to bake comments permanently into a PDF file at the end of this article.

A true PDF editor lets you change, move, delete, and add actual content to the PDF, in a way that won’t let anyone else change your edits unless they also use a true PDF editor. You can use a high-priced one like Adobe Acrobat DC(Opens in a new window) ($12.99 per month), with unique features for matching fonts on scanned images, but for many purposes, you can get good results from less expensive editors such as EaseUS PDF Editor(Opens in a new window), PDF-Xchange Editor(Opens in a new window) (Windows), Nitro’s PDFPen(Opens in a new window) (macOS), or Wondershare PDFelement 8(Opens in a new window) (macOS or Windows). The basic techniques are the same in all PDF editors.

You can also find plenty of web sites that offer to let you upload your PDF files and edit them in your browser without paying anything. Maybe you don’t care about security as much as I do, but I’m not ready to upload my documents to web sites that I know nothing about, and that mysteriously offer free services in exchange for harvesting my data.

Editing a PDF With Acrobat DC

Adobe Acrobat DC, the ultimate PDF editor, offers a spacious interface with fine-tuned controls for editing text and images. 

With your PDF open in Acrobat’s window, choose Edit PDF from the Tools menu. Blue boxes then appear around each PDF element—text or graphics. To correct an error in the text, simply click in the text box and start typing. Below is an example of using Acrobat DC to change the text in a header.

The same basic principles apply in more budget-friendly apps such as PDF-XChange Editor ($46.50). 

With the PDF open in the app, click Edit in the Home toolbar, then select the kind of content you want to edit—whether all the content on the page, text, images, or shapes. 

Below is an example of what it looks like to replace or modify images in a PDF using PDF-XChange Editor.

Notice the default option lets you edit text elements as blocks. If you turn this setting off, the app will only let you modify blocks of a few words, and you may end up with awkward-looking spacing between words.

Simply click on the text and make your changes. From the gear icon at the bottom left, you can select Properties Pane to get a menu with options for fonts and paragraph alignment, but you won’t find the fine-tuning controls that Acrobat offers.

One subtle problem with this kind of editing involves fonts. If the font used in the original PDF isn’t also installed on your system, the PDF editor may use a different font when you insert or change text. Acrobat DC is smart enough to use a similar font, but a sharp-eyed reader will see the difference, perhaps picking up on the fact that you changed the original PDF. 

Most other PDF editors do a worse job of font-matching, and many don’t bother even trying to match the surrounding font when inserting text. The only app I found that did a perfect job of font-matching was the macOS (and iOS) PDF Expert(Opens in a new window) ($79.99). When I inserted text in a PDF, the app used the font already embedded in the PDF file so the result looks seamless, and it’s impossible to detect my changes.

The only Windows-based PDF editors I’ve found that came close to the Apple-only PDF Expert are EaseUS PDF Editor ($79) and PDFelement 8 ($69.99). Like PDF Expert, these two apps try to use the font already embedded in the PDF when you change or insert text, but in at least one PDF that I tested, when I tried to insert text between ordinary lower-case words, both apps formatted the added text in small capitals and didn’t provide menu options that would let me choose lower-case instead. It could have been worse. For example, when I tried adding text to the same file in Qoppa Software’s PDF Studio Pro 2021(Opens in a new window), it converted the entire page to small caps. You may need to experiment to find the app that works best for you.

Formatting Your PDFs

No matter what PDF editor you use, don’t expect the same ease of use you get with a word processor. Some PDF-editing apps claim to let you edit as smoothly as you can in Microsoft Word. It’s simply not true. (You need to convert your PDF to a word processing file to truly edit it anew—more on that in a moment.) If you add a word or two that makes the current paragraph longer by one line, the paragraph will probably overlap the next paragraph, and you’ll have to move the paragraph below the one you’re working on—and there may not be enough room on the page to fit your changes. When you edit a line in a justified (full-width) paragraph, the text is likely to lurch to the left, leaving a blank space between the end of the line and the right margin. You can fix this by right-clicking on the line, choosing Paragraph from the pop-up menu, and setting the alignment to Justify.

Inserting a quotation mark can also cause formatting troubles. PDF editors don’t understand smart quotes (also known as curly quotes, or slanted typographic quotation marks) the way word-processors do, so they insert straight, typewriter-style quote marks instead. To get smart quotes, you need to copy and paste a quotation mark in the style you want from elsewhere in the same PDF or another source, such as the web or a Word document.

In any full-featured PDF editing app, you can resize text boxes and make the text reflow to match the new size, but remember that you can’t make text reflow from one page to the next. When you need to make large-scale changes in a PDF file, the best solution is to convert it to a word processing document. The easiest way is to import the PDF into Microsoft Word or any other advanced word-processor, make your edits, and then export the edited document as a new PDF. It only works with certain kinds of PDFs, however, and the formatting won’t be exactly the same as the original document but it may be close enough.

Advanced PDF Editing Features

Adobe Acrobat DC offers the most advanced PDF editing on the planet. Like all PDF editors, Acrobat works well with PDFs created by apps like Word and Excel. Further, when you add or edit text on a PDF, PDF editors can match the font of the surrounding text, since that font is installed on your Windows system.

Acrobat, however, performs one amazing feat that no other app even approaches. If you use Acrobat to edit an image scanned from an old book or magazine that used a hot-metal font that hasn’t existed for a hundred years, Acrobat lets you edit the text in the scanned image using that same ancient font. It does this trick by performing an optical character recognition (OCR) process on the image and constructing a font from the characters it finds. When you edit the text in the PDF, Acrobat uses this newly constructed font to match the surrounding text. In the image below, we’re adding the “A” to the heading “A Tea Party.” Acrobat uses the same letter “A” that appears elsewhere in the header. 

Edit PDFs for Free

Now let’s cover how to make permanent changes to a PDF using only free tools such as Adobe Acrobat Reader and Preview. 

On Windows, you need to install the BullZip PDF Printer Driver(Opens in a new window), which is free for personal use; other freeware PDF printer drivers may or may not work. (Microsoft’s built-in Microsoft Print to PDF printer driver isn’t useful for this purpose, because it doesn’t create a searchable PDF, only an image.)

In Acrobat Reader, make your comments (such as lines, text boxes, and highlights) on the PDF file, and then print the PDF to the BullZip PDF Printer Driver. The resulting PDF will have searchable text, just like the original, but the comments will be baked into the PDF, and not easily removable.

On macOS, open the PDF in Preview and make all your comments. From the Print menu, click the PDF button, and then Save as Postscript. Next, open that .PS file in Preview and export it again to PDF format. The resulting PDF will be searchable, but the comments will be baked in.

Other Tips, Tricks, and Apps for PDFs

Many other utilities let you edit PDFs, but they’re beyond the scope of this article. For more help with PDFs, we can show you how to sign PDFs on a Mac, how to sign PDFs using Acrobat Reader, and how to combine PDFs into one file.

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