Drop a PDF on the bench

Annotate

• Text — click anywhere and type. Choose Helvetica, Times or Courier, bold & italic, size and colour.
• Highlight — drag a box over anything; colour is adjustable.
• Draw — freehand pen for notes and markup.
• White-out — drag a white box over a mistake, then use Text on top to replace it. (PDFs don't store text editably, so this is how every editor "changes" existing text.) Important: White-out only visually covers content — the original text is still inside the file and can be copied out. For sensitive information, use Redact.
• Redact — drag a black box over sensitive content. On download, redacted pages are rebuilt from a rendered image so the text underneath is permanently removed: not searchable, not copyable, not recoverable. Redaction is applied at download time — inside the editor the box is still movable and undoable, and Find can still see the text until you download. Note: pages with redactions become image-based and any form fields are flattened.
• Line / Arrow / Box / Oval — drag to draw; drag the endpoints or corner handle afterwards to adjust.
• Image — place a photo or logo; the corner handle resizes without distorting. Click the Image tool again to swap pictures.
• Sign lets you draw or type a signature and place it anywhere. It adds a visual handwritten signature only — it does not create a cryptographic PDF digital signature.
• ✓ ✗ Date — one-click stamps for paper-style forms.

Select & edit

• With Select, drag anything to move it. The corner handle resizes; ✕ or Del deletes.
• Click selected text again (or double-click it) to edit the words.
• Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z redo — this covers page operations too.

Pages

• Open the Pages panel: drag the ••• grip (or use ↑↓) to reorder, ⟳ rotates, ✕ deletes, ⧉ duplicates a page with its annotations, ＋ inserts a blank page.
• + PDF merges other PDFs onto the end — then move their pages wherever you like.
• Extract saves chosen pages (e.g. "1-3, 5") as a separate PDF — this is also how you split a document.
• № stamps page numbers on every page in one go.
• Watermark stamps large translucent text (e.g. CONFIDENTIAL) across pages — auto-sized to each page, and still movable or deletable one by one.

Forms

Fillable fields are detected automatically and listed in the Forms panel; your values are written into the PDF when you download. Tick Flatten to lock them so recipients can't change them. After page operations (merge, rotate, reorder, delete…), values are flattened automatically — the panel will tell you when that applies.

Find, projects & saving

• Find (Ctrl+F) searches the document text and highlights every match.
• OCR reads scanned or photographed pages so Find works on them too, and embeds an invisible text layer on download — the PDF becomes searchable and copy-pasteable in any viewer.
• Project saves everything — the PDFs, annotations, form values, signature and images — into one file you can reopen later to continue editing.
• Download PDF bakes your edits into a real PDF you can share.
• Shrink re-renders every page as a compressed image for a much smaller file — with an invisible text layer kept in so it stays searchable. You can also set a password there to encrypt the file so it asks for it on opening. Note the result is image-based: form fields become non-interactive (their values stay visible).

Good to know

• Scanned PDFs have no text layer, so Find won't match them — run OCR first. (The engine downloads a few MB on first use and works best on clean printed text; handwriting is hit-and-miss.)
• Some password-protected PDFs open for viewing but may fail on download.
• Passwords you add via Shrink use the encryption available in the browser (128-bit RC4): fine against casual snooping, not for high-security secrets.
• Digitally signed PDFs: any edit invalidates the signature (you'll be warned on open). Bookmarks and attachments are not preserved when pages are restructured or the file is downloaded.
• Text in most languages (European, Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari/Nepali, Arabic) exports with a proper embedded font. Limitations: Chinese/Japanese/Korean can't be embedded yet (replaced with "?" and a warning on export), Arabic exports without right-to-left reordering, and the invisible search layer of password-protected files is Latin-only.
• On phones: pinch to zoom, tap-tap text to edit, and download your work before closing the tab — mobile browsers don't always warn about unsaved changes.

Shortcuts: V select · T text · H highlight · D draw · W white-out · X redact · L line · A arrow · R box · O oval · S sign · I image · Esc deselect · Ctrl+scroll or pinch to zoom.