How to edit text in a PDF
Open your PDF
Drag it onto the editor, or click Open PDF. You can also click “Try a sample PDF” to test it first.
Choose Edit text
Click Edit text in the toolbar. Now hover over the page — lines of text highlight as you pass over them.
Click the line you want to change
A small badge appears showing what Plate detected: the font name, size, and whether it's bold or italic. The text becomes editable in place.
Type your correction
Edit the text as you would anywhere else. Use the B and I buttons if you want to override the detected style.
Apply and download
Click Apply. The old text is covered using the page's actual background colour and the new text is drawn in a matching font, at the original size and spacing. Then click Download PDF.
Why most PDF editors make corrections look obvious
The usual approach is crude: draw a white box over the old text, then type new text in a generic font like Helvetica. On a white page with plain text you might get away with it. On anything else — a shaded table cell, a coloured header, a document set in Times or Calibri — the result is immediately visible as an alteration.
Plate works differently. Before you type anything, it reads the embedded font's real name, weight and style from the PDF itself; samples the text colour and the background colour from the rendered page; and measures the width the original text occupied. The correction is then drawn using the document's own font file where possible, at the original size, with spacing adjusted so the line keeps the same footprint and nothing around it shifts.
What gets matched
| Property | How it's determined |
|---|---|
| Font family | Read from the embedded font, and reused directly when possible |
| Bold / italic | From the font's own style flags, with pixel measurement as a fallback |
| Size | From the text matrix — never silently rescaled |
| Text colour | Sampled from the rendered page |
| Background | Sampled, so the cover patch blends into shaded cells |
| Spacing | Distributed so the line keeps its original width |
| Language | Detected across 9+ scripts, with a matching typeface |
Editing inside tables
Plate treats a wide gap between text as a column boundary, so clicking a figure inside a table gives you that cell alone rather than the whole row. It also splits editable units where the style changes, meaning you can edit an italic phrase without dragging the surrounding formatting along with it.
Working in other languages
Plate recognises Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean text, and embeds an appropriate typeface automatically when you type in one of them — so you don't get empty boxes where the characters should be.
What this can't do. A PDF stores positioned glyphs, not flowing paragraphs, so text doesn't reflow the way it does in Word — making a line much longer won't push the following lines down. Plate fits longer text into the available space instead. And a scanned PDF contains only an image of a page with no text inside it, so there's nothing to click; editing a scan would require OCR, which Plate doesn't currently include. An easy check: if you can select the text in any PDF viewer, Plate can edit it.
If you'd rather edit in Word
For heavy rewriting rather than a small correction, converting the PDF to Word may suit you better — though the layout will need tidying afterwards. For fixing a date, a spelling or a number, editing in place is faster and leaves the design untouched.
Common questions
Is editing PDF text free?
Yes — no account, no watermark, no page limit and no paid tier.
Do I have to upload my PDF?
No. Everything runs inside your browser, so the document is never transmitted to a server.
Will my correction match the original font?
In most cases yes. Plate reads the embedded font's style and reuses the document's own font file where it can, falling back to a close match when it can't.
Can I edit a scanned PDF?
No. A scan is an image of a page with no text inside it, so there's nothing to edit. That would need OCR, which Plate doesn't currently include.
Does the text reflow like in Word?
No. A PDF stores glyphs at fixed positions rather than flowing paragraphs, so longer text is fitted into the available space rather than pushing following lines down.
Can I undo an edit?
Yes. Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes up to 25 steps, including edits, deletions and page changes.