What this tool does
PDFGrover's PDF editor lets you add annotations and content on top of an existing PDF — text, images, shapes, freehand drawings, or an erase-rectangle mask — and save the result without altering the underlying pages. Use it to mark up a contract, add captions to a diagram, fill a printed-only form, or cover sensitive data with a white rectangle.
Input limits
- Single file per edit session
- Up to 200 MB per PDF
The seven element types
- Text — type in your content, then pick font, size, colour and weight before placing.
- Image — upload a JPG or PNG to drop on any page; great for logos, stamps, or inline photos.
- Rectangle — solid or outline, custom colour and stroke width.
- Circle / ellipse — same colour and stroke options as rectangle.
- Line — straight line between two points, configurable colour and width.
- Freehand draw — pen tool for signatures, highlights, arrows you draw yourself, or notes.
- Erase — a white rectangle that covers anything underneath it (visually, not cryptographically — for real redaction use our Redact PDF tool, which strips the underlying bytes).
Each element can be clicked to re-select, dragged to move, and resized with corner handles. Multiple elements per page are supported; there's no hard cap on how many you can add.
How the save works
Edit PDF uses two save paths chosen automatically based on file size.
Small & mid-size PDFs (up to 50 MB, up to 500 pages) — in your browser
Only your edits (not the page itself) are drawn onto a transparent layer the same size as the page, then placed on top of the original. The underlying text, fonts, and images stay exactly as they were — no re-rasterising. That's why a 5 MB source PDF stays roughly 5 MB after editing instead of ballooning to 100+ MB the way "rasterise every page" editors do.
Large PDFs (over 50 MB or 500 pages) — fast server save
Very large documents (think tens of MB or tens of thousands of pages) are slow to fully load in a browser. There, only the edited pages are sent over HTTPS to our secure server, which writes just the changes back into the file — dramatically faster than the in-browser path on huge documents (seconds rather than minutes for a one-page edit on a massive archive).
Either path produces a valid, editable PDF that opens in any viewer.
What Edit PDF can and can't do
- Can add new text, images, shapes, drawings and white-rectangle masks on top of any page.
- Can save without inflating file size.
- Can handle password-protected PDFs when you supply the password.
- Can't edit existing text in the PDF (replace "Jane" with "John" for example). Adding new text over the old is the work-around.
- Can't rearrange, delete, or insert pages — use Reorder Pages, Delete Pages or Merge PDF for page-level operations.
- Can't truly redact content — the erase tool is a white rectangle drawn on top, not a content removal. For forensic-grade redaction use Redact PDF.
Privacy and file handling
In-browser saves keep your PDF entirely on your device. Server-path saves upload over HTTPS; the uploaded files and generated output are deleted once the response is generated. If you close the tab mid-save on the server path, the job is cancelled and the temp files are swept up automatically. No signup, no watermark, no copies retained.