How to Add Text to a PDF (Type Anywhere on the Page)

Type on a PDF in 4 steps

1. 1

   Open Add Text

   Go to Add Text and select your PDF. The Text tool is already active, so the cursor turns into a text cursor over the page.

2. 2

   Click and type

   Click where the first line should go. A dashed box marked Type here appears. Press Enter for a new line. Press Escape, Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on Mac) or click elsewhere when you are done.

3. 3

   Style the text

   With the text selected, the side panel shows Font, Size (4 to 400), Bold, Italic, three alignment buttons, Color and Opacity. Drag a corner handle to scale the text; the font size changes with it.

4. 4

   Save PDF

   Add text on as many pages as you need, then click Save PDF. The downloaded file ends in -text.pdf.

Edit, move or delete text you added

• Change the words: double-click the text with the Select tool, or click it with the Text tool. Clear all the characters and the box is removed.
• Move it: drag it with Select, or nudge it with the arrow keys for exact alignment against a form line.
• Copy it: the duplicate button in the side panel makes a copy slightly offset from the original, handy for repeating a label down a page.
• Remove it: press Delete or Backspace, or use the red Delete button.

Fonts and characters you can use

The tool writes text with the three standard PDF font families: Helvetica (sans-serif), Times (serif) and Courier (monospace), each with bold and italic. These fonts are built into every PDF reader, so the file stays small and the text looks the same everywhere. The text stays real, selectable text in the saved file.

The trade-off is character coverage. Accented Latin letters such as é, ñ and ü work. Scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic, and most emoji, do not. The side panel lists any unsupported characters, and they are saved as "?". There is no option to upload your own font.

Adding text vs. replacing existing text

Add Text places new text on top of the page. It cannot open the words already printed in the PDF. To change a typo or an old address, cover the original with Whiteout PDF and type the correction over it. The full Edit PDF page has both tools in one toolbar, which makes that swap quicker; see how to edit a PDF.

Typing on forms that are not fillable

Many printed forms are saved as flat PDFs with no fields. Add Text works well here: click just above each blank line, set a size around 10 to 12 pt, and use Courier if the form has character boxes. If the PDF does have fillable fields, use Fill PDF Forms instead so the answers go into the fields. To sign, use Draw Signature.

Add text in Preview on a Mac

On macOS, open the PDF in Preview and choose Tools > Annotate > Text. Preview adds a text box annotation you can drag into place. It works offline, but the text is saved as an annotation, which some viewers hide or print differently.

Frequently asked questions