Edit PDF on iPhone
Drop text onto any page of an existing PDF and save a new copy.
Drop your PDF file here
or browse your device
A single PDF file, up to 100 MB. Files are processed on this device.
If you are on an iPhone and need to edit a PDF file, this page is the whole solution. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, and no account — add your file and the tool is ready.
iOS makes PDFs surprisingly hard. The Files app can view them and Quick Look can preview them, but neither can merge, split or compress. The App Store is full of PDF apps that want a weekly subscription for one operation, and several of them upload your documents to their own servers to do the work.
This runs in Safari on your iPhone, and in Chrome, Firefox or Edge for iOS as well. There is nothing to install from the App Store, no subscription and no permission prompts beyond choosing a file. Tapping the upload area opens the standard iOS picker, so you can take a file from Files, iCloud Drive, your Photos library or any connected storage provider.
PDFs are designed to be final, which is exactly the problem when a date is wrong, a reference number is missing, or a form needs a value typed into a box. Opening a full PDF editor for a change that small feels absurd, and most of them want a subscription first.
This tool does one thing well: it places text at a position you specify on a page you specify. Give it the text, the page, the distance from the left edge and the distance from the top, and it writes that text into the document and gives you a new file.
How to edit a PDF file
Add your PDF
Drop in the document you want to change.
Type the text
Enter exactly what should appear on the page.
Choose the page
Page numbers start at 1. Out-of-range values are clamped to the nearest real page.
Set the position
Distance from the left and distance from the top are both in points, where 72 points is one inch. A4 is roughly 595 by 842 points.
Add and download
Press Add text, check the placement in the preview, and adjust if it landed in the wrong spot.
Why use this edit pdf tool
No iPhone software to install
No application, no package and no app store download. The edit pdf tool runs in the browser already on your iPhone device.
Identical output everywhere
The same code runs on every platform, so a file produced on an iPhone is identical to one produced anywhere else.
Standard download handling
Finished files go to your usual downloads location and behave like any other file on iPhone.
Coordinates you can reason about
Vertical position is measured from the top of the page, which is how people actually read a page, rather than from the bottom as the PDF format does internally.
The rest of the document is untouched
Your text is drawn onto the existing page. Nothing is flattened, re-rendered or re-encoded, so the original content keeps its full quality.
Repeatable
Run the tool again on the file you just downloaded to add a second piece of text somewhere else.
Features
- Point-accurate placementPosition text anywhere on the page in PDF points.
- Top-down coordinatesVertical distance is measured from the top edge, not the bottom.
- Adjustable font size6 to 72 point in Helvetica.
- Any pageTarget any page in the document by number.
- Preview before downloadSee exactly where the text landed before you save it.
When people use this
Correcting a small mistake
Add a corrected reference number or date without going back to whoever produced the original file.
Filling in a flat form
Many PDF forms are just printed boxes with no interactive fields. Place text where the box is and the form is filled.
Adding a note or reference
Drop a case number, an internal reference or a short note onto a page before filing or forwarding it.
Labelling a page
Add a heading or a page label to a document that arrived without one.
Using the edit pdf tool on iPhone
Finished files go to Safari's Downloads, which by default is the Downloads folder in Files on your device. From there you can move them into iCloud Drive, attach them to an email, or share them with any app through the standard share sheet.
The tool itself behaves identically regardless of what you are running it on. The same options, the same validation, the same progress reporting and the same output — a file produced on an iPhone is byte-for-byte equivalent to one produced anywhere else, because the same code does the work in both cases.
That consistency is worth something practical. Start a job on an iPhone and finish it on a different device, or hand the page to a colleague on another platform, and neither of you has to learn a different interface or account for a difference in behaviour.
How text placement works
PDF page coordinates start at the bottom-left corner and increase upward, which is the opposite of how nearly everyone thinks about a page. The tool reads the page height and subtracts your distance-from-the-top value from it, so you can specify a position the way you would describe it out loud.
Helvetica is embedded into the document and your text is drawn into the target page's content stream at the resulting coordinates. Everything already on the page stays exactly as it was — this is an additive drawing operation, not a re-render.
Privacy
Your files are not uploaded. When you add a PDF file, your browser reads it from your device into the memory of the tab you are looking at, and the edit pdf operation runs there using your own processor. Nothing is transmitted to any server at any point.
That means there is no file for anyone to store, no retention policy to trust, and no deletion schedule to take on faith. The document exists only in the memory of an open browser tab, and it is released the moment you close it, reload the page, or press start over.
The site uses standard anonymous analytics to count page views and how often each tool is used. Those events record which tool ran and whether it succeeded — never a file name, never file contents, and never anything that could identify a document or the person processing it.
No account is required, so no personal information is collected. There is no profile, no history and nothing tied to an identity, because no identity was ever created.
Security
The strongest security property this tool has is structural: your file never travels anywhere, so there is no transmission to intercept and no server-side copy to breach. This is not a policy that could change — it is a consequence of where the code runs.
You can verify it in about thirty seconds. Open your browser's developer tools with F12, select the Network tab, and use the tool. You will see the page's scripts load — including the PDF libraries, which are fetched on demand the first time a tool runs — and then nothing further. No request carrying your document is ever made.
For a stronger test, disconnect from the network once the page has loaded. The tool will keep working exactly as before, which is only possible because nothing is being sent.
Uploaded files are validated in the browser before anything runs: the extension must match what the tool accepts, the file must not be empty, and it must be within the size limit. Malformed documents produce a clear error and a retry option rather than a silent failure.
What this tool does not do
Being clear about limits is more useful than a feature list that quietly omits them. Existing text cannot be edited or removed, only new text added; images, shapes and freehand annotation are not supported, and text is placed as a single line with no automatic wrapping.
If you need capabilities beyond that — redaction, PDF/A conformance, OCR, or scripted batch processing across thousands of documents — dedicated desktop software genuinely earns its licence fee, and this is not trying to replace it. For the specific job of producing a edited PDF, everything you need is on this page.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the downloaded file go on an iPhone?
- Into the Downloads folder in the Files app, which is Safari's default location. Tap the download indicator in Safari's toolbar to jump straight to it, then use the share sheet to move it wherever it needs to go.
- Is the edit pdf tool different on iPhone?
- No. It is the same tool with the same options and the same processing code. Only the browser and the download location differ.
- Can I edit the text that is already in the PDF?
- No. This tool adds new text on top of the page; it does not rewrite existing content. Editing text already in a PDF requires reflowing the original layout, which is a fundamentally harder problem and needs a full editor.
- How do the position numbers work?
- Both are in PDF points, where 72 points equals one inch. Distance from the left is measured from the left edge of the page. Distance from the top is measured down from the top edge. An A4 page is about 595 points wide and 842 tall, so 50 from the left and 100 from the top puts text near the upper-left corner.
- The text landed in the wrong place. What now?
- Nothing has been saved to your device unless you downloaded it, so just adjust the numbers and run it again. Increase the distance from the top to move text further down the page, and the distance from the left to move it right.
- Can I add images or shapes?
- Not at the moment. Text placement is what this tool does. For a diagonal stamp across the whole page, the Watermark tool is a better fit.
- Why did some of my characters disappear?
- The standard PDF fonts cover the Latin-1 range. Characters outside it are removed rather than failing the whole operation, and typographic quotes and dashes are converted to plain equivalents first.
Related tools and pages
- Edit PDFThe main edit pdf page, with the same tool and every option.
- Sign PDFAdd a typed signature to a document and download it straight away.
- Watermark PDFStamp text such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL across every page.
- Rotate PDFTurn sideways or upside-down pages the right way up and save the change.
- Merge PDFCombine several PDF files into one document, in the order you choose.
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Browse every PDF tool, or read the help and FAQ pages. Details of how files are handled are in the privacy policy.