A free PDF editor that never uploads your file

Frequently asked questions

Is this PDF editor really free?

Yes, with no asterisk. There's no account, no watermark, no daily task limit and no feature that turns out to be paid once you click download. It's free because there's no server doing the work — everything runs on your own machine, so there's no per-file cost for us to recover.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. The PDF is opened by your browser and never leaves your device. You don't have to take our word for it: load this page, turn off your wifi, and the editor still opens and edits files. Nothing that depended on a server could do that.

Can I edit the existing text in a PDF?

Not the original text, and we'd rather be straight about why. A PDF stores instructions for drawing glyphs at coordinates, not editable paragraphs, and the fonts inside are usually subsetted to only the characters already used — so changing 'John' to 'Mary' can fail simply because the document contains no capital M. What you can do here is add text, cover something up, draw, highlight and sign, which is what most people actually need. Genuine text editing needs a desktop tool like Acrobat.

Why isn't there a Redact tool?

Because the honest version is hard and the dishonest version is dangerous. Most 'redaction' features draw a black rectangle over text that is still sitting in the file, recoverable by anyone who opens it in another editor — a study found eleven popular tools, Acrobat included, leaking redacted text this way. The one browser library that removes content correctly is licensed in a way we can't use. So we don't ship a button that lies. Use a desktop tool for genuinely sensitive removal.

Can you convert a PDF to Word?

Not honestly, so we don't offer it. Rebuilding a PDF's layout as an editable .docx needs a commercial layout-reconstruction engine — the big converters license that technology and run it on their servers. We'll extract clean, correctly-ordered text and Markdown instead, which is what most people searching for that actually want.

How big a file can it handle?

There's no artificial cap. The real constraint is memory, since the whole document is held in RAM — a laptop will handle several hundred megabytes comfortably, a phone considerably less. Past about 100 MB you'll see an advisory, but nothing is blocked.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes — it's a website, so there's no app to install, and the interface rearranges for small screens with the toolbar within thumb reach. Large scanned documents are harder on a phone than a laptop simply because there's less memory to work with.