A free Adobe Acrobat alternative for filling, signing and redacting PDFs

PDF is a free PDF editor that runs in your browser tab, part of the Workspace. It opens a PDF, draws its pages, and gives you comments and highlights, form filling, signatures and initials, text, pictures and cropping, page organising, combining and splitting, a header and footer, a watermark, 256-bit AES password protection, and redaction that takes the words out of the file rather than covering them. The menus and tool sets are laid out the way people who have used a desktop PDF editor expect. There is no account and no upload, and it works with the network off once loaded. It does not change the text already on a page, write certificate-based digital signatures, or build form fields.

What Acrobat is good at

Adobe Acrobat is the reference PDF program, from the company that created the format. The free Acrobat Reader opens, fills and signs; the paid versions, sold by subscription, add editing of the text and pictures already on a page, conversion to and from Office formats, form building, redaction, comparison, accessibility checks and print production. Adobe also runs online PDF services tied to an Adobe account and its cloud storage. For somebody who prepares PDFs for a living, the editing of existing text and the print and accessibility tools are hard to replace, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Most people are not that person. They receive PDFs rather than make them, and what they need to do to one is small and occasional, which is a lot to pay a subscription for, or a lot to sign in to an online service for when the file is a contract or a medical form.

What happens here instead

The editor is code in your browser tab. pdf.js draws the pages and pdf-lib writes the file, both served from this site. Your PDF goes from your disk into the tab's memory, and the changed file goes back to your disk, or into a folder you choose. Nothing is sent to a server because there is no server doing the work. Switch the network off after the page loads and every part of it still works.

What Acrobat users reach for, and where it is here

Redaction that takes the text out

Drawing a black rectangle over a line in most editors adds a shape on top of the page. The words are still underneath, and copy and paste, or any program that reads the text, finds them. That is how redacted court papers and government reports have been un-redacted by readers, repeatedly.

Here, marking an area or a line of text for redaction and then applying it, or saving, draws that page as a picture with the boxes burned in and writes it back as that picture. What was under the box is not in the file at all. Find Text marks every match of a name or a number across the document in one go, so nothing is missed on page forty.

It is blunter than Acrobat's own redaction, which takes out only what is under the mark and leaves the rest of the page as text. Here the rest of a redacted page stops being selectable and searchable. For a court bundle or a disclosure, SEAL does the same burn-in and writes a record of the output file's SHA-256, and REDACTLOG keeps the schedule of what was taken out and why. Can text under a PDF redaction be recovered? explains the failure this avoids.

What is not here

• Editing the text already on a page. This is the big one. A PDF stores letters at positions in fonts that may not be in the file, and Acrobat's paid versions do a great deal of work to let you retype a paragraph. Here you can cover a word and write another; you cannot click into a sentence.
• Certificate-based digital signatures. The signature here is a picture of your mark, as a pen makes. It is not the cryptographic signature with a certificate that some contracts and public bodies require. PACT signs with a record of the document's SHA-256 and the time, which proves a file has not changed, but it is not a certificate signature either.
• Building forms. Fields a PDF already has can be filled; new fields cannot be drawn.
• Print production and accessibility. No preflight, no colour separations, no tagging for screen readers, no PDF/A.
• A locked PDF, rewritten. A file with an open password can be read in the editor if you have the password, but not saved from it; take the password off first with PADLOCK, which is free.
• Other alphabets in the text you add. Text written onto a page uses a standard font; letters outside Western European alphabets come out as question marks. The page's own text is unaffected.

What is free, and what is Pro

The PDF editor is free for everyone, with no account and no watermark on what it saves. It is part of the Workspace, and the Workspace is free. The single-purpose tools in the table are free to open and check a file with, and saving what they produce is part of Pro. OBSCURA Pro is $144 a year, which is $12 a month, or $15 month to month, with 7 days free first; a day pass is $5 and a week pass $9. For a team it is $69 a month or $690 a year for up to 25 people, with 14 days free.

Open a PDF you have. Open the PDF editor, or try it on the sample it offers, and fill, sign, comment, organise, protect or redact it. If the job turns out to need changing the existing text, this page has already told you it is not here.