A free PDF editor that never uploads your file

PDF opens a PDF in the tab, draws its pages, and lets you fill its form, write and draw on it, highlight, place a signature, black out an area, turn, move, remove and add pages, and save the result to your own disk. The file is read and rewritten by code running in the tab; there is no server, no account, and the page works with the network switched off. What it will not do is edit the words that are already on the page, shrink the file, or turn it into a Word document, and it says so rather than pretending.

Why the free online editors upload

A PDF editor that runs on somebody else's computer has to have the file, so the first thing every free site does is take it. What happens then is in the terms you did not read: how long it is kept, whether it is used to improve something, who can look at it. For a leaflet that does not matter. For a lease, a medical form, a contract, a passport scan, it is the whole question, and it is the reason a bank statement should never go through a free converter to have one page rotated.

The alternative is not a program you install. A modern browser can draw a PDF (the same code that shows one when you click a link) and can write one, and both can run entirely inside the tab. The file goes from your disk into the tab's memory and back to your disk. That is all this is.

What is there

• Reading. Pages drawn as you scroll, with the text under the cursor so it can be selected and copied, thumbnails down the side, and Find across the whole document.
• Forms. Every field the PDF carries (text, boxes to tick, choices, lists) appears in a panel. Type an answer and it lands on the page as you go; the saved file carries it in the field, so the next reader sees it as a filled form. Tick one box and the answers are burned into the page instead, so they cannot be changed.
• Writing on it. Text anywhere, in a size and colour you choose; a highlighter; freehand drawing; boxes, filled or outlined. Every one is drawn into the page when you save, so any reader shows it and nobody can switch it off.
• A signature. Draw it with a mouse, a finger or a pen, or type your name, and drag a box where it goes. It is kept in this browser so you do it once.
• Blacking out. Drag a box over what must go. When you save, that page is written as a picture with the box burned in, so what was under it is not in the file at all, not hidden under a rectangle for the next person to peel off.
• Pages. Turn a page, drag it to a new place, remove it, add the pages of another PDF, or add pictures as pages. Save one page as its own PDF.
• Getting things out. The PDF, a page as PNG, every page as PNGs in a zip, the text as a plain file, and the file's own record of its title, author and what made it, which you can clear.
• Your disk. Save to computer writes the file back where it came from, or into the folder you have chosen for the site, without a download prompt.

What is not there

This is the part a comparison page usually leaves out.

• Editing the text already on the page. A PDF does not store paragraphs; it stores letters at positions, in a font that may not be in the file. Changing a word properly means reflowing what was never a flow. You can write over the page, cover a word and write another, but you cannot click into a sentence and retype it.
• Making the file smaller. Compression means re-encoding the pictures inside the PDF, which is not done here. SHRINK does it for a picture before it goes in.
• Turning a PDF into Word. For the same reason as the first bullet. OPTIC reads the words out of a page and gives you text.
• A locked PDF. One with a password can be read here, if you have the password, but not rewritten, because the writing code does not encrypt.
• Other alphabets in the text you write. The font used for writing on a page is a standard one; letters outside Western European alphabets come out as question marks. The page's own text is unaffected.
• A certificate-based signature. The signature here is a picture of your mark, which is what a pen makes. PACT signs with a record that can be checked later.

Which tool for which job

The site has had single-purpose PDF tools for a while, and each does its one thing with more care than a general editor can. The general editor is for the ordinary afternoon; the table says where to go when the job is the whole point.

How to check the claim

Open the page, switch the network off (aeroplane mode does it), and open a PDF. Everything above still works. A tool that uploads cannot do that, and no amount of wording about encryption in transit changes what a tab with no connection can and cannot do.