Edit Text In Place - Free Online Browser Tool

Change text that is already in the PDF, keeping its font, size and position.

Every other text tool on this site draws new words on top of old ones. That looks right on the page and is the wrong answer more often than people expect, because the original text is still in the file. Select the line afterwards and you get both versions. Search for the old word and it still comes back. And if what you needed to do was take a name out of a document, it is not gone - it is under a white box. This tool does the other thing. A PDF keeps its text as characters inside the page, and those characters can be changed directly. What comes out is the same line, edited: the same typeface the document was made in, the same size, the same colour, sitting in the same place on the page. Nothing is drawn on top, so there is nothing underneath. The old words are not in the file any more, which is the only version of this that is worth anything when the change is a date, a status or a name. How it manages to keep the styling is worth a sentence, because it is the whole reason this page exists. Re-flowing a line - letting a longer word push the rest of the paragraph down and move the lines beneath it - needs the font metrics and the layout engine that produced the document, and no browser has one. So this does not re-flow anything. It changes which characters the page draws, and the layout it already has is left in place. A replacement that is about the same length as what it replaces looks entirely natural. Two limits, stated before you start rather than after. A line cannot be made longer than the room the original left, and the page will not reflow to give it more - so a much longer replacement will run into what is beside it, and the tool tells you when that is happening rather than letting you find out in the finished document. And a scanned page is a picture of text with no characters behind it, so there is nothing here to edit; OCR has to run first, which is a different tool on this site. Everything happens in this tab. The file is never uploaded.

This edit text in place utility runs completely inside your web browser. Your document is opened locally and processed on your own device using JavaScript and WebAssembly, so your file is never uploaded to any server. There is no signup, no watermark and no limit on how many documents you can handle.

  • 100% client-side - files never leave your device
  • Instant processing, no upload wait
  • Works on desktop, tablet and mobile
  • Free forever, no account required

Common next steps: Add Text Overlay, Find and Replace Text.

How to Use the Edit Text In Place Tool

Five steps, and the whole thing runs locally on your own device.

  1. Type the text you want to change

    A word, a date, a company name - whatever appears in the document exactly as it is written.

  2. Type what it should say instead

    Leave this empty to remove the text rather than replace it.

  3. Choose where it applies

    Every appearance by default, which is what you want for a date that was typed in five places, or just the first one for a single change.

  4. Decide how the capitalisation carries over

    Matching keeps the style of the original, so DRAFT becomes FINAL and Company Ltd becomes Acme Ltd, rather than lowercasing the first letter because you typed it that way.

  5. Save the file

    Open it and check the line: the font, size, colour and position are the ones the document already had.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the old text really gone, or just hidden?

Gone. This rewrites the characters in the page rather than covering them, so searching the finished file for the old word returns nothing and selecting the line gives only the new text. That is the difference from the tools that draw on top, and it is the reason to use this one when the change is not cosmetic.

Why does the replacement keep the original font?

Because nothing is being drawn. The page already draws this line in a font the document embeds; this changes which characters it is told to draw. The typeface, the size, the colour and the position are all properties of the line that already existed, so they are simply still there afterwards.

What happens if my replacement is longer than the original?

The page will not re-flow, because doing that properly needs the layout engine the document was made with. A slightly longer word is fine and looks normal. A much longer one will run into whatever sits beside it, and the tool reports that rather than quietly letting the two overlap.

Can I use this to remove something confidential?

For text, yes - that is the case it exists for. The characters are replaced or deleted in the file itself, not covered. Two cautions: the page copy behind that text, or an earlier version of the file, is a separate problem this tool does not touch. And if the sensitive text is an image rather than characters, it has to be dealt with as an image instead.

Will it work on a scanned document?

No, and it will tell you so. A scan is a picture of text with no characters behind it, so there is nothing to rewrite. The OCR tool on this site turns a scan into a document with a text layer, and this tool works on the result.