How to Edit Text in a PDF on Mac

You need to edit the text itself when the mistake is in words that are already printed on the page, not in something you want to add. A misspelled name, a wrong amount, last year's date or an outdated address are the typical cases.

Covering the mistake and typing on top looks fine on screen, but the old words are still in the file. Search finds them, copy and paste picks them up, and screen readers read them aloud. For anything you send to a client, a bank or an office, the old text should be gone, not hidden.

Preview can't change existing text in a PDF, but it can add new text, signatures and redactions on top of the page. The tools live in the Markup toolbar and in the Tools menu.

What Preview can't do is swap one word for another. A white rectangle or a text box laid over a mistake only hides it, and a redaction leaves a black bar where the words were. For a clean correction you need an editor that changes the page content.

• Add text: choose Tools > Annotate > Text, type in the box and drag it into place.
• Sign: choose Tools > Annotate > Signature and create a signature with the trackpad or the camera.
• Remove sensitive text: choose Tools > Redact and drag over the words. When you save, the text under the black bar is deleted.

File Acture's Edit & Sign PDF lets you select a word or a whole line on the page and type over it, and it writes the change into the PDF itself. A double-click selects a word, a triple-click selects the line, and dragging selects part of it. Turn on Edit Text and a single click is enough to place the cursor.

The new text keeps the original font whenever that font contains every letter you type, and it stays centered or right-aligned if the original was, so a longer amount in a right-aligned column grows to the left. The old letters are removed from the page, so a search finds the new wording and not the old one.

The rest of the editor covers the jobs Preview handles too. Add Text places a new text box with its own font, size and color. Signature lets you type your name in a signature font, draw it with the trackpad or mouse, or place a scanned signature or stamp. Eraser removes the text, pictures and drawings inside the area you drag over while the background stays, and Whiteout covers an area with white.

Saving writes only the pages you changed, so links, bookmarks, form fields and document information survive. Save PDF asks where to put the copy and suggests the original name with “-edited” added; the original file stays as it was.

Editing works line by line, the way a PDF stores its text, so it suits corrections better than rewriting whole paragraphs.

• Lines don't reflow. Each line is edited on its own. A correction that is longer than the room on the line is fitted into it instead of pushing words onto the next line.
• Missing letters fall back to a system font. PDFs often embed only the letters they use. When you type one that isn't there, the old text is still removed, but the new text is drawn in the closest font on your Mac and can look slightly different.
• Scanned pages have no text to edit. A scan is a picture. You can erase an area, which paints it in the surrounding color, and add a text box on top. To make a scan searchable, use OCR PDF.
• Rotated or vertical text can't be edited in place, though the Eraser still works on it.
• Whiteout only covers. Use the Eraser or an in-place edit when the old content must really be gone.

Online PDF editors work on a copy of your document on their servers, which is a poor fit for contracts, payslips and ID documents. File Acture edits the PDF on your Mac and never uploads it. To count free runs it sends only the tool's name and two anonymous identifiers, never file names or contents.

The free version includes 3 runs on each Mac, and saving an edited PDF counts as one run; for unlimited use, see pricing. If the result is too big to email, compress it to a target size, and if it's sensitive, protect it with a password.