How to add text to a PDF
- Drop the PDF on the box above. The first page opens.
- Click where the text should go — on the blank line next to "Name:", for example — and type. Press Enter to finish.
- Drag anything you added to move it, double-click text to change it, or select it and press Delete. Use the arrows above the page for other pages.
- Press Save PDF and download the result.
Typing on a form that isn't fillable
Many forms arrive as a plain PDF: the labels and blank lines are printed on the page, but there are no fields to click into. (If your form does have fields, use Fill PDF Form instead — it types into the real fields.) The usual workaround is a text box dropped where you click, at whatever size the tool starts with, which you then nudge up and down until it more or less sits on the line.
Here, when you click next to printed words or on a blank line, the page reads that line from the PDF itself: where its baseline is and how big its letters are. Your text is placed on the same baseline at the same size. Click on a label such as "Date of birth:" and the text starts after it; click on the underscores and it starts where you clicked. You can switch this off with Match the printed text and set the size yourself.
How we checked it: a test form with labels at 10, 11 and 12 pt, one page rotated by the viewer and one with a shifted crop box, was filled in with real mouse clicks a few points above each line. Read back from the saved PDF, all four added lines had exactly the label's baseline and size (0.00 pt difference), upright on the rotated page too. With matching switched off, a click on a 14 pt line put 10 pt text 1.5 pt off its baseline.
Ticks, crosses and white-out
- Tick and Cross: click a checkbox. The mark is sized to the text on that line and drawn as lines, so it prints crisply at any size.
- White-out: drag over old text to cover it, then type the correction on top. White-out only covers: the original words are still in the file, and anyone can select or copy them. To remove information for real, delete the page or use a proper redaction tool.
What the saved PDF contains
The text is written into the page as real PDF text, not as a picture. It stays sharp when zoomed or printed, and it can be selected, copied and found with search. Plain Latin text uses Helvetica, one of the fonts every PDF reader has. Letters outside it — ş, ğ, ł, ő, ř, Cyrillic, Greek — are not in the standard PDF fonts, so for those the page embeds the open-source Roboto font with only the letters you typed. In our test "Zoë Łukasiewicz-Şahin" came back out of the saved file letter for letter.
The rest of the document is left alone: the original file is edited in place rather than rebuilt, so links, bookmarks and fillable fields keep working. Pages that a viewer shows rotated, or that have a crop box, get the text exactly where you clicked and the right way up. Everything happens in your browser; the PDF is never uploaded.
Next steps
Need a signature as well? Sign PDF adds a drawn, typed or photographed signature and the date. To send the result by email, compress the PDF; to put pages from several files together, use Merge PDF.