Best downloadable pdf editor

If you're doing your PDF editing from a computer, check to see if you've got built-in software that can handle the job. Mac users, for example, might not realize how good Preview is at annotating documents and adding signatures to PDFs. You can save a lot of time searching for the best free PDF editor if it's already there right under your nose. In testing free PDF editors, we use the same process as when we test paid versions, though we make note of the limitations that can come with free software.

We consider both general PDF editors as well as applications that are specifically designed for annotations. When looking at free PDF editors, I use a few different types of documents that comply with file-size limitations. These include text-heavy files, documents with a mix of formatted images and text, and simple documents with text and images inserted into the document in a linear fashion.

While free apps don't often include features like text recognition, I tested that feature when it was available.

I also tried making changes to text, replacing and adding images and adding annotations with each product. Jeffery Battersby is a writer, actor and raconteur, in addition to being an Apple certified trainer, a project manager and a specialist in smartphones, small business information technology, productivity software and office tools.

The best free PDF editors let you do a lot for absolutely nothing. PDF Candy. Specifications Developer: Icecream Apps. Upgrade from free version: None.

Reasons to avoid - Limited text-editing features. Specifications Developer: Red Software. Category: PDF annotation. Reasons to avoid - Very limited fonts. Apple Preview. Specifications Developer: Apple. Compatibility: macOS. Category: : PDF annotation; image editing. Category: Legal forms, PDF annotation. Reasons to avoid - Limited text tools - No way to change existing text.

Specifications Developer: Smallpdf GmbH. Category: PDF conversion and editing. Reasons to avoid - No annotation or markup features - Limited font options - Limit of 2 documents per day.

Jeffery Battersby. Topics Apps. You'd expect Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to be great because it comes from Adobe, the birthplace of the portable document format. To some extent, this full-service PDF-editing application meets that expectation.

Acrobat DC's OCR engine can convert scanned documents to text, which you can then search through and change. But Acrobat doesn't offer to convert an entire document the moment you open it. Instead, the app waits for you to begin using the Pro DC's edit tools, recognizing and converting the pages as you select them for editing.

Changing text in an OCR'd document was simple and the results looked great. It's also easy to edit images and text in documents you haven't scanned. I was able to make changes to everything with zero issues. It feels like a half-realized demo of what the app could be.

Editing tools surround your document, and the UI feels disorganized, offering few options for customization. This doesn't make this program bad at what it's supposed to do; it just makes you feel like you're working outside your chosen OS.

You can choose from 44 tools to create or convert PDF files. It's also easy to rearrange pages within a document, add watermarks, protect PDF files with passcodes, edit metadata within a PDF file, split or add pages to documents, and extract images. Actual text editing is pretty limited, the trade-off you make to enjoy a fairly feature-rich free PDF editor.

Once you've made your edits in PDF Candy, you can download the edited document or upload a new document to work on. PDF Candy keeps all of your documents in a queue so you can download them all at once after you've finished making changes to them. PDFescape used to limit you to 50 pages, so the higher limit is a welcome change. But PDFescape's annotation tools are easy to use.

You'll find a pretty solid set of standard annotation tools that can easily add, highlight and strike through text; insert notes; and otherwise mark up the pages of your PDF file. Using the web app's insert tools, you can also add new images and text to a document, white-out text, and add web links and form fields. PDFescape does have some major limitations in adding new text. Because there are no OCR capabilities, you can't make changes to existing text; you're limited to adding new text to an existing document.

Additionally, the app has very limited font options, as it doesn't use any of your computer's fonts. Apple's Preview app is built-in to the macOS and offers a minimalist but valuable set of tools for marking up any PDF file. You won't find full-on PDF editing here.

But if you need a basic set of tools for highlighting or redacting text, making notes, or adding comments to a document, you won't likely need much more than what's already available on your Mac. Preview's markup tools are hidden when you first open a PDF document. To see them, you'll have to look for the small pencil icon that appears near the Spotlight search bar at the top of your PDF document's toolbar.

Clicking this reveals a small set of tools you can use to select text and add objects, text or notes to your document. The app's standout feature is a signature tool you can use to store a signature you create using your trackpad or scan using your Mac's iSight camera.

You can then easily add that signature to a document by clicking Preview's Signature tool. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. By Tim Fisher. Tim Fisher. Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire.

Tweet Share Email. Apps Best Apps Payment Services. What We Like. What We Don't Like. Visit Sejda. Download Inkscape. Visit PDFescape. Visit Smallpdf. Our Review of LibreOffice. Download LibreOffice. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error.

Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Tell us why! More from Lifewire. PDFsam Basic. A free PDF editor will let you modify images and text in PDF files without the need to convert them to a different format or pay for expensive dedicated software, and we've rounded up five of the very best options right here. This is because Adobe, the original creator of the PDF format, still owns some technologies associated with it.

While there are integrated services that you can use such as Markup in iOS and macOS, a dedicated app to edit your PDF documents is definitely the best way to comment and edit your documents in one place. It can be challenging to know which PDF editor is the right one to use. It gives you total freedom to create new PDFs from scratch and edit existing documents without fuss, on desktop or mobile. This platform also offers simple e-signing, and the ability to add comments and highlights to information already stored in your PDFs.

The Smallpdf system actually contains lots of other PDF modification tools too. In other words, you can access it from any supported device simply by visiting the Smallpdf website and dragging-and-dropping a PDF into your browser.

The interface is a little more complex than that of the Smallpdf editing suite but gives you easy access to plenty of helpful features such as a stamp option for marking documents as 'Expired' or 'Approved'.