Edit

Edit PDF text on iPhone, iPad and Mac

Most mobile PDF apps let you drop a text box on top of a page and call it editing. PDFlick edits the document's own text: tap a line, change the words, and the replacement takes the original's font, size, weight, colour and leading, sitting exactly where the old run sat. The old text is covered in the background colour sampled from the page itself, so there is no white rectangle giving the edit away.

Coming Soon iOS 26.2 or later · iPadOS 26.2 or later · macOS 26.2 or later

Also searched as: edit PDF text · PDF text editor · change text in PDF · edit PDF offline

How to edit PDF text on iPhone, iPad and Mac

On iPhone & iPad

Open the document and choose Edit PDF.
Tap the line of text you want to change — PDFlick picks up its font, size, weight and colour.
Type the replacement. It reflows into the same position with the same styling.
Select a single word to make just that word bold, italic, underlined or a different colour.
Save. The page is re-emitted as vectors, so the text stays sharp and selectable.

On Mac

Open the document and switch to the editing canvas.
Click into any text run and type — or press T to add a new text box.
Style with ⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘U; duplicate an object with ⌘D and delete with ⌫.
⌘Z steps back through edits, ⌘S saves, and the toolbar can reveal the saved file in Finder.

What makes it different

Replacement text is matched to the original font, point size, weight, colour and leading, not approximated with a default face.
The covering fill is sampled from the page background rather than assumed to be white, so edits on tinted or scanned pages blend in.
Pages are re-emitted with drawPDFPage as vectors — the document is never flattened into an image, so text stays selectable and searchable after editing.
Scanned pages have no text layer to edit. Tap Read Text and on-device OCR recognizes the words first, then you can replace them.
Images and shapes can be added and repositioned alongside the text.

Edit PDF — questions

Can I edit a PDF that was scanned from paper?

Not directly — a scan is a photo, so the words are pixels rather than text. Tap Read Text and PDFlick runs OCR on device to recognize them, after which you can edit the recognized text like any other.

Will editing make the text blurry or unselectable?

No. Pages are re-emitted as vectors rather than rasterized, so edited text stays as sharp, selectable and searchable as the original.

Can I change just one word without restyling the whole sentence?

Yes. Select the individual word and apply bold, italic, underline or a colour to it alone; the rest of the line keeps its original styling.

Do I need a subscription or an internet connection?

No account and no connection. PDFlick has no server, so every editing feature works in airplane mode.

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