Edit a PDF

How to edit a PDF

Open the file, click the line you want to correct, type. The text picks up the font embedded in the document, its size and its color: the rewritten line is indistinguishable from its neighbours, and that is the only way to edit a PDF without it showing. If your sentence runs longer than the one before, the paragraph recomposes to the width of the block and the text below shifts within the page’s flow, as in a word processor. Images and shapes move and resize by their handles. Nothing is uploaded: opening, retouching and exporting all happen inside your browser, and you can cut the connection once the page has loaded. The downloaded file is an ordinary PDF, with no watermark and no mark of where it came from.

Fixing a mistake, not redoing the page

Most online editors lay your correction over the page, in an annotation layer: the original word stays underneath, the font changes, and it shows in print as it does on copy. Here, the text operator is taken out of the page’s content stream and replaced. A spelling mistake, an amount, a date, a misspelled name are fixed in three seconds, and the document stays the document. It is also what makes it possible to search for a word and replace it everywhere, including when the new word runs longer than the old one.

A locked, signed or scanned PDF

A password-protected PDF opens here with its password, and becomes editable again. A digitally signed document can be edited, but its signature will no longer hold: that is the very principle of a signature, and no tool can do anything about it. A scan, for its part, is only an image: there is no text to pick up. Run it through character recognition first, which lays a text layer under the image; you will then be able to search and copy, but retouching stays limited to what was recognized.

Changing the font, the size or the color of a text

Click the line, and the style bar shows what it carries: its font, its size in points, its color. Change one of the three, and only the selected passage changes — not the whole page. You enlarge a size too small to read in print, set a pale gray text back to black, put a word in bold inside a sentence that was not. If the font you want is not in the document, Vélin offers it from among those that look like it, and embeds it into the file so that it opens the same everywhere. A character missing from the font — an accent, a symbol — is taken alone from a fallback font, without changing the look of the line.

Deleting text, without leaving a gap

Removing a line that no longer holds, a notice, a paragraph: the text is taken out of the page’s content stream, and what follows moves up instead of leaving a hole. That is what separates a deletion from a white rectangle laid over the top, which leaves the text in the file — it comes back out on a copy-paste, and on a search. To make a confidential passage disappear, something else again is needed: redaction, which removes the characters and says so.

On a computer, on a tablet and on a phone

Vélin is not software to install: it is a page. It works on Windows, on macOS, on Linux, on iPhone, on iPad and on Android, in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge — anywhere there is a recent browser. On a phone, the four commonest gestures sit at the bottom of the screen and the rest lives in a sheet that rises from below. The app also installs from the browser’s menu, and then works with no connection at all.