How to use it
- Drop the PDF. Page thumbnails appear on the left; click one to edit it.
- Pick a tool: Text (click, type, Enter), Rectangle / Line / Highlight (drag), or Insert image. Switch back to Select to move, resize, rotate or delete an object (Delete key).
- Use Rotate 90°, Move up/down and Delete page for page-level changes.
- Press “Save PDF” and download. The source file is never modified; save again after further edits.
Example
A 6-page contract: delete the blank page 6, rotate the landscape appendix on page 5 to upright, type “APPROVED 2026-10-19” in red 18 pt on page 1 and draw a box around the amount on page 3. Saving produces a 5-page PDF about 4 KB larger than the original: the text is one Tj operation with the Helvetica-Bold standard font, the box is a re S path. The text can be found with Ctrl+F in any viewer.
How the editor works
pdf.js renders the current page at 1.5 px/pt onto a canvas that becomes the background of a Konvastage. Objects are stored in display coordinates (points, top-left origin, after the page’s rotation). On save, pdf-lib copies the pages in their new order, sets each page’s /Rotate, and converts every object into user-space coordinates (bottom-left origin, before rotation) with the inverse of the display transform; text and images rotated on screen receive the matching counter-clockwise angle. Highlights are drawn with the Multiplyblend mode at 45 % opacity so the text underneath stays legible.
Limits
- No editing of existing text, images or form fields; no OCR.
- No undo history yet – delete an object and re-create it, or reload the file.
- Images are placed at their pixel size scaled to 40 % of the page width; PDF-internal compression is not applied beyond what PNG/JPEG already provide.
- Pages are rendered one at a time; very large scans may take a second to appear when switching pages.
Sources: pdf-lib – PDFPage drawing API, PDF 32000-1:2008 – 8.3 Coordinate systems, 11.3.5 Blend modes, Konva – Transformer.
Questions
- Can I change the text that is already in the PDF?
- No. PDF stores text as positioned glyphs without flow, and reliable in-place editing needs the original fonts. Cover the old text with a white filled rectangle and type the new text over it, or convert the PDF to Word, edit, and convert back.
- Is the added text selectable in the saved file?
- Yes, for Latin-1 text: it is written with the standard Helvetica fonts. Text with other scripts is embedded as a high-resolution transparent image, which looks the same but cannot be selected.
- Why do objects move when I rotate a page?
- They do not move relative to the page content: rotating turns the page and everything on it together, so a box around a paragraph stays around that paragraph.
- Does this sign documents?
- Use the PDF Sign tool for signatures – it has a drawing pad, typed signatures, image upload and date stamps. Neither tool creates a cryptographic (digital certificate) signature.