This tutorial shows you how you can write on a PDF online, if you’d prefer to write on a PDF form, for example, rather than type on it. You can also use the drawing tool and your mouse to write comments and shapes online. Here’s how!

What is a PDF writer? A PDF writer is a software application or tool that creates, edits, converts, and annotates portable document format (PDF) files.

When editing a paper, nothing’s quite the same as being able to take out a red pen or highlighter and mark up the pages. Or is it? PDF.Live’s online edit tool allows you to write or draw all over your PDF online. This allows you to make more nuanced comments and edits while saving the paper required to print out a physical copy.

If you’re looking to sign a PDF, skip over to this page, where we show you how to upload and add your signature to a PDF online.

So, how do you write on a PDF? This article will be all about drawing and marking up a PDF using PDF.Live’s online editor. This editor functions entirely in your browser, with no additional downloads!

Write on a PDF Online

Once you locate the PDF on your computer, head to the PDF.Live Studio to edit the PDF online.

You’ll need to drag and drop your PDF into the editor or click Select File and navigate to where the PDF is stored on your computer. Or, find a PDF you’ve already uploaded to the PDF.Live studio. Once you’re ready to start, click Continue.

You’ll then be taken to the PDF.Live online editor. Here, you’ll find several functions for editing, annotating, and protecting PDFs. Feel free to familiarize yourself with the editor before moving forward, as there are a lot of great features!

To get started writing on a PDF, click the Draw option at the top of the PDF.Live editor’s toolbar.

Your cursor will be turned into a Plus sign. You can now draw on your PDF!

You’ll notice that, by default, the PDF.Live Free Hand tool lets you draw free-hand in red on your PDF. This may not be your preferred color! To change the style settings of your pen, click the Color option under the draw tab. 

Here, you’ll be able to adjust the color, opacity, and stroke size of your free-hand tool. You can also adjust the Opacity and Weight of your pen. 

Draw with multiple styles on the same PDF.

To erase a drawing that you’ve made on your PDF, simply click the Erase button under the Draw toolbar. Then, click drag the eraser over the part of your drawing that you want to remove.

You will notice a slightly transparent circle appears where you click and drag. This signifies the area that will be erased.

With the PDF.Live editor you can also draw shapes on your PDFs! To do this, select the Shapes tab at the top of the toolbar. You’ll have the option to create rectangles, circles, and more.

With a shape option selected, click and drag on your PDF to create a new shape!

Once you’ve created a shape, click the blue circles around the outline of your shape to adjust the shape size and position. Click the Trashcan icon to delete a shape you’ve created. 

You can also erase your shapes using the same eraser tool. The shapes tool functions identically to the free-hand tool within the editor, with the main difference being the preset shape you’re creating versus drawing “freehand”. 

The draw and shape tools are just some of the many powerful functions that the PDF.Live online editor has for editing and marking up a document.

The post How to Write on a PDF Using Your Computer appeared first on pdf.live.

Hiding specific pieces of text is easy enough with a physical document — you can simply use a white-out pen or black marker and draw over a piece of text. But how do you do this with digital documents? This tutorial explains how.

First, an important distinction: Blacking out text is not the same as redaction!

When you black out (or white out!) text on a physical document, the content is still present on the PDF. A layer containing the black shape is simply applied over the PDF. If you were to black out text using PDF.Live and send it to someone, they could use PDF.Live’s editor or some other editing tool to remove the black rectangle and see the information you originally hid.

Redacting is a secure process that removes or hides confidential information. When you redact text, the content is deleted, so it’s impossible for anyone reading the document to see what was originally there. If you wanted to redact text using PDF.Live’s editor, you would use the Add Shape tool in the Popular Editing Tools to delete the text or object. You can then use the Rectangle tool in the Annotate tab to draw black rectangles to indicate where content was redacted, as described below.

So, how do you black out text using PDF.Live’s editor?

Steps to Blacking Out Text on a PDF

First, locate where the PDF you want to edit is on your computer. Then, upload your PDF to an editor. You will need to drag and drop your PDF into the editor or click Select File to Edit and navigate to where the PDF is located on your computer. Once you’re ready to get started, click Edit PDF.

Similar to how we white out text, we’ll be drawing a rectangle over your PDF using the draw shape function. Under the PDF.Live toolbar, select the Shapes tab.

You’ll need to adjust the formatting settings of this shape so that it has a black fill. Do this by selecting the Fill option and selecting a black color in the color gradient. You can also enter the Hex code 000000.

Set the Color to black as well. This is the outline color of your box. 

You can then click and drag anywhere on your PDF to draw a box. If you want to further adjust the dimensions of the rectangle, you can click the rectangle again and drag the dotted edges as necessary to cover all the text you’d like to black out. You can also further adjust the formatting settings of this box if you want to change the color or outline. 

Once you’re happy with how the rectangle looks, click away from it. You’ll now see a rectangle in your document covering up the content that you wanted to be blacked out. 

If you want to further edit or adjust rectangles or other shapes you’ve made on your PDF, click them at any time to adjust their size, properties, rotation, or position. 

The post How to Black Out Text on a PDF appeared first on pdf.live.

Change the Order of PDF Pages

The size of a PDF can range from just a couple of pages to an entire e-book with hundreds of pages. When creating a PDF, it’s easy to accidentally place pages out of order or need to rearrange them. The problem is, once the PDF is created, it’s difficult to edit page order when you’re using a PDF reader. To rearrange pages, you’ll need an editing tool.

PDF.Live provides an online editor to change and reorder PDF pages. With the editor, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping the pages in the order of your choice. In this guide, we’ll show you how to rearrange PDF pages however you’d like.

Steps for Reordering Pages in a PDF File

To get started changing page order, you’ll need to convert your PDF into an editable PDF. Simply drag and drop the PDF into the editor and select Edit PDF. This will convert the PDF to an editable PDF and open the PDF.Live online editor, which functions entirely in your browser.

The PDF live editor has a lot of powerful editing options for PDFs. But today we’ll be focusing on the Manage Pages option located on the left side of the PDF.Live editor. 

This will open the Thumbnail page view. This allows you to quickly overview and scroll through the different pages of your PDF. You’ll see smaller thumbnail versions of your PDF pages to get a sense of the content contained on each page. There are also several different tools available for organizing, removing, or inserting new pages. 

This thumbnail view also allows you to rearrange the order of a PDF’s pages. Simply click and drag the page to wherever you’d like it to be. You will have to release your mouse click when a blue vertical line appears, indicating which page you’re going to put the page you’ve select din front of. Once you’ve dragged the page to the new location, you’ll see the new order reflected in the thumbnail viewer.

In the above example, we’ve rearranged the order of this 6 page brochure by clicking and dragging the pages around. Once you’ve got an order you’re happy with, select Confirm. The pages will be rearranged. 

Once you have all the pages where you’d like them to be, you’ll need to download the PDF again. The downloaded version of the PDF will contain all the edits that you’ve made.

If you have a lot of pages in your PDF, you may need to scroll up or down on the page organization tool to see all of the pages in your document. 

To combine more than one PDF, use the Merge function that combines two or more different PDFs. To learn more about doing this, we recommend checking out the Extract-Split-Separate a Page from a PDF article that details how to extract specific pages from a different PDF and then place them in a new PDF.

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Remember whiteout? It came in a small bottle or tape, which you brushed, rolled or sponged on paper to cover up errors. It could be messy and smelly, too! Today’s digital whiteout is much easier to use, and PDF.Live’s tutorial walks you through the white-out application.

There are a number of reasons why you may want to white-out or cover an object on a PDF. Perhaps you have a piece of content that you don’t want viewers of a PDF to see. Or maybe there is an error in a PDF that you want to cover up or obscure. No matter your reason, whiting out or covering objects is simple using PDF.Live’s editor. The PDF.Live editor functions entirely in your browser, with no additional downloads required to start editing a PDF.

It should be noted that whiting out a document is not the same as redaction, which is a technical process that physically removes text and objects from documents. Using a digital whiteout process to cover content in a PDF doesn’t securely redact the content. Think of it like using whiteout tape or liquid to cover hard copies; the whiteout tape can be peeled off to remove what it was covering. To truly remove content from a PDF, use PDF.Live’s Edit text & image & shapes feature.

Steps for Using White-Out on PDFs

If you want to white-out or otherwise edit a PDF, you’ll need to convert your PDF to an editable PDF. Simply drag and drop your PDF into the field and select Edit PDF to start editing your PDF online. PDF.Live’s editor has a lot of functions, and we encourage you to explore the many ways you can edit a PDF.

Removing Objects and Text with a Free Online PDF White Out Tool

While there isn’t a specific whiteout tool on the PDF.Live editor, you can achieve the effect by creating a shape over the area that you want to white-out, erase, obscure or hide. You can then fill this shape with white, black, or another color, depending on how you want to cover the area of the PDF.

To get started, at the top of the PDF.Live editor, select the Shapes tab. 

For the best results, click the Shape icon and select the Square shape. You will now be able to click and drag to draw a square over the area of the PDF that you want to cover up.

The rectangle will then appear over that section of the PDF. Click the shape to change its size, position, or formatting. Click the blue circles align its perimeter to adjust the outer bounds of the shape to cover the entire area. 

Of course, this rectangle doesn’t look much like white-out, so once you’ve got the shape where you want it, click Fill on the toolbar and select a White color. The below Hex code FFFFF will work. 

You’ll have a few other options on the toolbar, such as changing whether the shape has a border and its thickness.

To white out a section of your document, set the fill to white and set the stroke color to white. 

As you can see, the rectangle now has a white fill color that obscures the text underneath. For best results, white out text that already has a white background!

At the top of the PDF.Live editor toolbar, you’ll see those current formatting settings are saved for all additional shapes you make. When you make additional rectangles on your document to white-out text, you won’t need to adjust the color of each individual rectangle. 

Rectangles such as this can be used to white-out or black out any part of a PDF that you don’t want to be visible. You can also further adjust the fill color using the color spectrum to match the background of your PDF if you want the blocked-out part of your PDF to be seamless with a background that isn’t white. 

This is just one of the many features available with the PDF Live editor. Consider exploring the many options available for editing, annotating, and viewing PDFs entirely in your browser with no additional downloads.

The post How to White Out a PDF appeared first on pdf.live.

Change PDF Text

Changing text in PDFs does come with some important drawbacks, however. It’s notoriously difficult to edit a PDF once it’s been created. Considering that most PDFs are built in document editors (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint for example), it’s usually far easier to change the text of a document in the editor itself.

Sometimes, though, this isn’t a possibility. Whether you don’t have access to the original document or need to make a quick edit, PDF.Live’s online editor allows you to make changes directly to a PDF. PDF.Live makes adding new text and erasing old text simpler than ever.

Editing current text can be easy with the PDF.Live editor that automatically detects the formatting settings of existing documents. It can re-create the text in the exact or very similar font, color, and size that was chosen when the PDF was built!

We’ll show you how to edit text in a PDF, as well as how to delete text and create new content that may look similar to the PDF’s original text.

Can You Edit Existing Text in a PDF?

1. Upload your PDF to the PDF.Live editor. Either drag and drop it into PDF.Live or select a PDF you’ve already uploaded and click Edit PDF.

Find the PDF you’d like to edit the text in and click the PDF.Live editor link to get started. PDF.Live’s editor functions entirely in your web browser with no additional downloads. Either drag and drop your PDF into the editor or click on a PDF stored in your PDF.Live account. Once you’ve uploaded your PDF, click Edit PDF.

2. In the PDF.Live toolbar, click Edit Text to get started editing text.

This feature allows you to select text that already exists in your document. 

The PDF.Live editor will automatically detect text fields in your PDF that you can click to edit. You’ll see below that PDF.Live has detected the text within our PDF and surrounded it with a light blue box. This signifies areas where text can be edited. 

Remember: Online PDF editors aren’t intended to create or design documents, the way that Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Canva are. PDF.Live is for making small edits. It has a far easier time recognizing text, images, and shapes that you’ve created using the editor. It will try its best to recognize native elements (elements created outside PDF.Live), but it may not be an exact match.

3. Double click the text area that you want to edit. You can now edit the text within your document.

Using the text selected, you’ll now be able to delete or add new text the same way that you would using a document editor. 

In the above example, we edited the “Ocean Kayaking” text to now say “River Kayaking”. The PDF.Live editor matched the formatting settings of the text that existed within this sample flier document and created new text according to the document’s specifications. You may need to adjust the formatting settings, though, such as bolding or italicizing the text. 

4. Edit the formatting settings in the PDF.Live Edit Text toolbar.

You can also use the PDF.Live editor to change the style of the text within your documents. In the example below, we reduced the size of the heading and added italics to the subheading. The PDF.Live editor successfully updated the text with our edits. 

5. With a section of text selected, press the Delete button or key on your keyboard to remove that text from your PDF. 

By clicking the trash can, you can completely remove this  heading from your document. Remember that by doing this, the text will be permanently deleted. Make sure you are ok with removing the text before deleting it!

6. Click Add Text in the PDF.Live toolbar to add new text to your document.  

This will turn your cursor into a + sign, which you can click and drag to add a text field to your PDF. 

The new text box that you create will have PDF.Live’s default text style, so you’ll need to adjust the font and size to match the rest of your document. Luckily, with PDF.Live, it’s easy to change the formatting settings of text to match up with existing text. 

With the PDF.Live editor, you’re not restricted to just adding, editing, or removing existing text. You can also change the formatting settings like the font, color, alignment, or text style of your PDF’s text. 

Look how much we’ve changed the text from our original document using just the PDF.Live editor!

With the powerful PDF.Live editor, you can edit text in existing PDFs easily. Create new text, adjust existing text, and change the formatting settings of your document without the need for a document editor!

The post How to Edit Text in a PDF appeared first on pdf.live.

You need to add lines to a PDF or markup a PDF by drawing lines, and you don’t know how? This online tool will help you draw on a PDF file freehand or by adding shapes.

PDFs are an excellent document format to use for receiving and sending information online. The PDF is particularly useful if you’re editing a document for someone and want to notate that changes need to be made to a document. For this reason, you may be wondering if you can draw on a PDF and how to do so. Drawing on a PDF may not be possible with some PDF readers.

To draw on a PDF, you’ll need to use a PDF editor. PDF.Live’s online editor lets you make edits entirely in your browser. You don’t need to download and install special software. We’ll show how you can draw, make lines, and otherwise mark up a PDF as you see fit entirely online using the PDF.Live editor.

Before you begin, you’ll need to convert your PDF to an editable PDF. This is very simple: Just drag and drop your PDF into the editor or click Select File to Edit and navigate to the PDF in your file browser.

Once you’ve uploaded your PDF, select Edit PDF to get started.

Tips for Using PDF Drawing Markup Tools

To draw on a PDF, in the PDF.Live toolbar, click the Draw option. This will turn your cursor into a + sign. 

You’ll see a few different formatting options for your PDF drawing. 

• The Weight changes the thickness of your drawing
• The Opacity affects how transparent your drawing is
• The Color changes the color of your drawing
• Erase removes existing drawings that you’ve made

This drawing won’t be constrained to straight lines or angles. It’s a free draw, which means it will take on whatever shape you draw.

For drawing Straight Lines, navigate to the Shapes tab on the toolbar and select the Line tool. 

Line tool: Allows you to create a single straight line

Curve tool: Lets you make a curved line by clicking two points and then dragging to adjust the angle of the curve. 

Upon selecting one of these options, you’ll then be prompted to draw a line on your PDF wherever you choose. You can also create shapes in this section by selecting the Square, Polygon, or Circle tools. 

Much like the freehand draw tool, these tools change your cursor to a + sign, which lets you click and drag anywhere in your PDF to create a shape to your sizing specifications. 

As with the draw tool, you can change the formatting settings of your shapes on the toolbar. You can also adjust the opacity of the shape if you want a transparent highlight effect. Or, you can remove the fill altogether for a hollow box to better call out a section of a PDF. 

You can use the shape tool alongside the freehand draw tool to make more nuanced edits or drawings in your PDFs. 

We’ll also point out the Eraser (E) tool, which lets you remove any shapes or drawings that you’ve created. 

Consider trying out PDF.Live’s powerful editor tool today to draw on a PDF and more. Select “Start Free Trial” and simplify your PDF workflow. 

The post How to Draw on a PDF Online appeared first on pdf.live.

Erasing text in PDF.Live’s online editor means you can remove lines of text in a PDF without opening it in a document editor. This is especially useful for when you want to quickly edit a PDF itself rather than the original document you may have built in a program like Microsoft Word. PDF.Live’s editor functions entirely in your web browser — no need for apps or programs to be downloaded on your computer.

Adding text to a PDF is useful for making edits to a document, but what about removing text? Is this possible with the PDF.Live editor?

Yes! In this guide, we’ll show you how to erase text in a PDF online using PDF.Live’s online editing tool. If you are looking for a free PDF eraser, we offer a free trial, cancelable at any time. If you have bulk documents to edit, we offer one of the most affordable subscriptions (also cancelable at any time) for editing and erasing text.

Erase Text in a PDF Online With PDF.Live’s PDF Editor

1. Upload your PDF to the PDF.Live Editor.

Drag and drop your PDF into the editor to convert it to an editable PDF. Or, click Select File to Edit and navigate to where your PDF is stored on your computer. Once you’ve uploaded your PDF, click Edit PDF to get started editing.

2. Navigate to the Edit Text tab in the PDF.Live editor toolbar.

3. Editable areas of text in your PDF will now be selectable and editable.

The Edit Text tool will now highlight areas in your PDF that it’s identified as text. Some text may be unreadable, particularly if it is part of an image.

4. With the text selected, you can either Edit or Delete text fields.

4. With the text selected, you can either Edit or Delete text fields.

Select text shows a dashed line with dots in corners, showing that this is the active box.

Editing the text allows you to add and delete existing words in the same way you would in a document editor. For example, you can backspace to remove individual words. In the example below, we’ve used the PDF.Live editor to delete the “Kayaking on” text.

Alternatively, with the text selected, press the Delete key to remove the area entirely. 

You can also edit existing text, as seen below! The PDf.Live editor will automatically detect the formatting settings of the text and adjust to best match it. See how we’ve edited this document using the PDF.Live editor:

How To Delete Words From a PDF

You may want to delete an individual sentence, word, or letter, depending on your needs. To do this, select the text box from which you want to remove a word. You’ll be able to highlight text as you would in a document editing software.

Press the Backspace button on a PC or the Delete key on a Mac keyboard to delete words within your document. You can add, remove, and edit text the same way that you would with a program like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Once you’re done making your edits, select Download or Export to download the edited version of your PDF. You’ll see your deleted words or text boxes have been removed in the new document!

The post PDF Eraser: Erase or Delete Text in a PDF appeared first on pdf.live.

Some free online PDF editing sites allow you to edit PDFs, but with one condition: They put a watermark logo on your edited PDF. How can you edit a PDF without someone else’s watermark? This post explains what watermarks are, why they’re used, and how you can edit PDFs online for free and in bulk for a very low-cost subscription.

A watermark is a semi-transparent symbol, phrase, or word that is displayed over a document or image because the original owner may want to protect its use from being widely distributed. Because the watermark is intrusive but not obscuring, the content beneath is still visible and the document usable.

Watermarks can be useful if you want to protect a certain piece of content against re-use or are concerned about content that you’ve created not being attributed to you. Many sites will allow you to preview images or content that they’ve created with watermarks over them, only removing the watermark when you pay a fee. 

What Does a Watermark Look Like?

For context, below are two images from Dreamstime, which PDF.Live sometimes uses for our tutorials. The first one shows you what content with a watermark looks like, and the second image shows you the same image without it.

Above is a cute puppy stock image with Dreamstime watermarks.

Above is a licensed version of the same image, with the watermarks removed.

Editing a PDF Online Without Watermark

PDF editor sites may employ watermarking techniques to get you to pay for their PDF editing services or tools. They may initially allow you to use their editing features, but once you download your edited PDF, you’ll notice they’ve placed a watermark on your document. The site may inform you that a non-watermarked version of the PDF can only be obtained if you pay them a certain premium.

PDF.Live’s editor allows you a limited free trial, but we don’t require you to use a watermark — PDF.Live will never place a watermark on your documents (unless you want to add your own custom watermark).

We offer a large number of editing features (signing, merging, compressing, and converting PDFs), a limited number of which you can do daily for free or more often for a very low subscription price (cancel at any time). The best part is that PDF.Live’s editing tool functions online with no additional downloads.

PDF.Live allows for limited free tasks every day to try out our services. You can get a feel for our editor, convert PDFs to JPG images, and more. None of the PDFs that you receive while using your free tasks will have watermarks on them.

If you’re happy with how PDF.Live is working, full services can be unlocked with PDF.Live unlimited for a low monthly cost. Try out PDF.Live unlimited today with our 7-day free trial to see if it’s right for you.

Remove a Watermark from a PDF?

Creators, editors, publishers and businesses use watermarks to prevent their intellectual properties from being used without permission. If you are looking for a way to remove the watermark from a PDF, contact the person or company who originated the image or content. PDF.Live doesn’t advocate removing watermarks from copyrighted material. 

Photo 28015916 / Cute Puppy © Willeecole | Dreamstime.com

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