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Edit PDF text
Fix typos and update copy. Free, no sign-up.
How to edit text in a PDF
Editing replaces text in place, matching the original font so the change is invisible.
- Open your PDF. The document opens in an editor.
- Click the text and type. The replacement matches the surrounding font and size.
- Download. A PDF with your corrections written in.
What happens when you click a line
A PDF stores glyphs at fixed positions, not paragraphs, so nothing can retype a word in place the way a word processor does. What Folia does instead is specific: it reads the page's rendered text layer to find the run you clicked, takes its size from that run, samples the paper colour just outside it and the ink colour inside it from the rendered page, lays a filled rectangle in that paper colour over the original, and draws your replacement on top — at the original size and, where the document's own embedded font can be pulled out of the file and re-embedded, in that font.
One consequence is worth knowing before you rely on it. The original glyphs are still in the file, underneath the patch. Copy the page, or run a text extractor over it, and the old wording comes back. For a typo that is harmless. For a name, a figure or an address it is not: Redact PDF rebuilds the page so the text is gone rather than covered.
Where an edit stops matching the page
There is no reflow. For spaced scripts the box covers the run you clicked out to the first wide gap — a whole line of prose, but only one cell of a table row. For Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Khmer and right-to-left text it covers just the clicked word. Your replacement is pinned to the original run's width and squeezed to fit it, down to half width; past that it overflows rather than shrink to an unreadable sliver. Nothing after it moves. Rewriting whole paragraphs is a different job — convert with PDF to Word, rewrite there, and convert back.
The patch is a single flat colour, so it vanishes on plain paper and shows on a gradient, a photograph or a shaded table row. A box opened over Khmer always opens empty rather than pre-filled, because Khmer read back out of a subsetted font is too often wrong to hand you. And when the document's own face cannot be reproduced — never embedded, or missing a letter you typed — the line is drawn in a bundled font and Folia reports the substitution instead of letting the wording quietly change shape.
Questions
Can I edit a scanned PDF?
Run OCR PDF first so there is real text to edit; otherwise the page is just a picture.
Can I change the size or styling of text I type?
Size and styling, yes. Select text inside a box and a small bar appears: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, bullets, numbering, a highlight, a colour picker and an exact size for the selection. What is missing is a font-family picker — an edit reuses the document's own font, and a fresh Add text box starts at 14 point in near-black using the bundled font. Choosing a different face is a Folia for Desktop feature.
Is there a find and replace?
Not in the browser tool — you click each line you want to change. Folia for Desktop has find and replace, which measures each match's real baseline and lands every replacement on it.
Why is the edited file larger than the original?
Your replacement needs a font embedded. An edit that reproduces the document's own face re-embeds that face's program, usually already a subset, so tens of kilobytes. A box drawn in the bundled font embeds the whole face, because the subsetter drops glyphs and is deliberately switched off: roughly 600 KB for the Latin face, several megabytes for a Chinese, Japanese or Korean one. Folia also reopens the saved bytes and checks the page count before handing them to you, so a damaged result never reaches your disk.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Every tool on this site runs inside your browser, using the same engine as the Folia desktop app. Your file is read from your disk into your browser’s memory, processed there, and handed back as a download. It never crosses the internet, so there is nothing for us to store, leak or hand over.
Is there a file size limit?
We impose none. The only ceiling is your own device’s memory, which differs from one computer to another — so we read what your browser reports about this machine and show the resulting limit on the page. Light tools like merge and rotate handle far more than heavy ones like OCR, which must render every page. For anything larger, Folia for Desktop has no limit at all.
Is it really free? Do I need an account?
Yes, and no. Every tool is free and unlimited, with no watermark and no sign-up. Ads pay for the site, and your own computer does the work, which costs us nothing. Signing in with a paid Folia plan simply removes the ads.