Resources » Working With PDFs » What Is a PDF Editor? What Does the PDF.Live Edit App Do?

Tips For Getting the Most From PDF.Live’s Edit PDF App

PDF.Live’s editor tool is a powerful online tool for changing, measuring, and reading PDF files. Our editor can add and delete pages, convert PDFs to fillable forms, annotate a PDF, and more. The editor works entirely in your browser, so there’s no need for a separate download to view and edit your PDFs.

The PDF.Live editor does a lot of cool things. In this article, we’ll go over the cool stuff that you can do using the PDF.Live editor, including advanced tools. All of these editing features are included with a PDF.Live subscription.

Basic PDF Editing Features

These are the basic functions that you can do with PDF.Live (with links to more help articles to see how it works).

Advanced PDF Editing Features

These are a few more advanced things you can do with PDF.Live:

8 ‘Hidden’ PDF Editing Tools

The following aren’t really “hidden” features, but they are lesser known features that may surprise and delight you! 

1. Find and replace

The PDF.Live editor can find and replace text in your PDF similarly to a document editor. This tool is located in the upper-right corner of the PDF viewer in the PDF.Live editor. It’s marked by a magnifying glass icon with the text “Search”. 

Find the word "item" and replace with "canoe" in PDF.Live's find-and-replace text editing tool for PDFs.

Using this tool, you can enter text in the search bar to find all the instances of that text within your document. You can search case-sensitive, which will only look for the exact lower or upper case text that you type. This is useful for finding a specific word or phrase that you’re looking for in your document. 

However, you can also replace all the instances of that word with another word. Type the word that you’d like to replace in the text box under Replace. You’ll be able to replace individual instances that are listed below, or replace all instances of the word that you searched. 

2. Rubber stamp

Under the Insert or Fill and Sign tabs in the PDF.Live editor, select the Rubber stamp icon. This tool places a stamp anywhere on your PDF in case you want to stamp specific important information somewhere on your document. 

Standard PDF digital stamps include the words approved, completed, departmental, experimental, as is, confidential, draft and more.

The PDF.Live editor has a few preset standard stamps available for use, but you can also make your own custom stamps by selecting Custom

Create a new stamp. In this example the word Draft with a timestamp showing Guest on Oct. 16, 2024 at 112:59 AM used the stamp in green.

This new stamp is completely customizable with options to change the display text, the font, color, and style, as well as what elements are displayed in the stamp. For example, you can set up a stamp that marks certain areas of a document as “reviewed,” with the stamp displaying the time you reviewed that area. 

3. Built-in snipping

Do you frequently use the Windows snipping tool on a PC (or shift + cmd + 4 on a Mac), which allows you to screenshot specific parts of your screen? PDF.Live has a snipping tool built into the editor, so you can screenshot or clip specific parts of your PDF. 

Access this tool under the Edit tab. The snipping tool is the middle icon with the scissors. Upon selecting this, the snipping tool dialogue box will appear, which gives you the option to copy, download, or crop the snips that you make. 

The snipping tool selected the word "item" and copied it to the clipboard.
  • Copy to clipboard — Copies the region of the PDF as a picture. This picture can be pasted somewhere else in another document or email, depending on what you want to do with it. 
  • Download — Downloads the section of the PDF as a PNG image file. If you need to email a specific part of a PDF to someone or want to export an image from a PDF, this is the best tool for the job.
  • Crop and remove — Permanently remove everything except the section you highlight in your PDF. This tool permanently crops all but a specified area from your PDF. It can’t be undone, so make sure you have a copy of your original document saved. 

4. Calendar date

The Calendar tool quickly places dates anywhere on your document. The cool thing about this feature is that it places the current date as it’s listed in your computer’s system time. 

Select the Fill and Sign tab and then click the calendar icon near the middle of the toolbar. Your cursor will change to a +, signifying that you can now place dates on your document. Click anywhere on your document to add a date!

Add the date Oct. 16, 2024 to a PDF.

As with other text that you place with the PDF.Live editor, you can change the text style of the dates so that it matches, or stands out, from the rest of the text in your document. 

When filling out forms or documents, you may have to sign and date certain areas, so this tool is useful for doing this automatically.

5. Combo box

A combo box is a dropdown that has multiple selectable options from which a reader can choose. If you’re creating a form that has a section that needs to be restricted to a few preset values, combo boxes are very useful for this. 

Head to the Forms section and then select the Combo box icon in the middle of the toolbar. This looks like an upside down L

Add a field named Combo Box Form Field 3 to a PDF.

The combo box has to be configured to function properly. In this menu, you can name your combo box and then specify the options that the box can be filled in with under the Options menu. By selecting Read Only, the options won’t be choosable, but only viewable by the document reader. Select Required if you want recipients to fill out the combo box. 

Here, we’ve specified two options in the Combo Box, which are displayed when selecting the drop-down arrow. 

A combo box offers two options in a PDF editor

6. Change PDF view

Sometimes a different perspective is useful for editing a PDF. With the Change View feature, you can change the way you display the pages of the PDF you’re currently editing. Find the change view feature on the far right of the toolbar.

From the PDF.Live editor, select page transition. Options include continuous page, single page, double page and more.

From here, you can change your PDF to look more like a book, for example with the Double Page view. You can also display one page at a time or continually scroll through all the pages in your PDF.

The PDF live editor shows what it looks like to have two pages visible in the online editing tool.

7. Add callout comments to your PDF

If you’re working on a group project or reviewing a PDF that someone else has created, it’s useful to make comments or suggestions on what edits should be made. PDF.Live has a lot of ways to do this in the Insert tab, but we’ll be highlighting the Callout feature in particular.

To add a callout, select the Insert tab and then the Callout icon, shown here. Hover over the buttons to find the Callout icon.

This feature allows you to draw a box pointing to a specific element of a PDF. You can then add text to this box to detail what changes you think should be made.

The callout box reads "change this!" and an arrow points to the area of the PDF that needs to be changed.

You can adjust the arrow placement, as well as the vertex, to make the callout point at specific items in your PDF. 

8. Add checkboxes to your PDF

We’ve covered how to make a PDF a fillable form before, but what if you just want to add checkboxes to a document for someone to mark off in a form? With the Checkbox button in the Forms section, you can do just that.

To add check boxes to a PDF, select the Forms option from the menu and then Checkbox field.

With this, you can designate an area on a PDF that, as a reader, you can check and uncheck. The reader can then save a version of the document with their checked boxes.

A close up of a PDF with a check box added after a paragraph about selling kayaks and canoes.

The Designer Assistant has a lot of great additional features for creating an effective form, so explore around for the feature you need.