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Annotation

Annotate a PDF in your browser

Highlight, comment, draw and mark up a document — and export a PDF that actually carries what you added.

Most annotation tools show your marks on screen and lose them on the way out, or bury them in a proprietary layer only their own reader can display. Here, exporting draws every annotation into the page content of a standard PDF. The file you download opens in Adobe Reader, in Preview, in a browser — and shows exactly what you saw, with no plugin and no dependency on this site.

How to annotate a PDF

  1. Open the document

    Load the PDF in the editor. Nothing to install, no plugin, no reader to configure.

  2. Mark it up

    Highlight passages, draw freehand, add shapes and arrows, drop a sticky note where a remark would otherwise cover the text.

  3. Adjust

    Every annotation stays movable, resizable and recolourable. Nothing is committed to the file until you export.

  4. Export

    Each annotation is drawn into the page content of a standard PDF — it opens the same way everywhere, with no dependency on this site.

The twelve tools

Each one is drawn into the exported file — none of them is display-only.

Highlight

Mark a passage in a translucent colour that leaves the text underneath readable.

Freehand

Draw with the mouse, a trackpad or a stylus — a circled figure, an arrow scribbled in the margin, a signature-like mark.

Sticky note

A small marker holding your remark off to the side, so a long comment does not hide the paragraph it refers to.

Text box

Visible text placed directly on the page, with a choice of font, size, bold, italic and underline.

Text edit

Replace wording already printed on the page — see the caveat below on how this works.

Rectangle and ellipse

Frame a zone, a figure, a block to be reviewed. Outline or filled, with adjustable thickness.

Arrow and line

Point at something, or connect two elements. Solid, dashed or dotted.

Triangle

A third shape when a rectangle and a circle are already taken by another meaning in your markup.

Cross and check

Rejected, accepted. Two dedicated tools because the gesture is frequent enough to deserve one click.

Editing existing text: what it really does

The text edit tool covers the original text with a white rectangle and writes your replacement on top. That is worth knowing before you rely on it, because it has two consequences.

First, the appearance. On a white page the cover is invisible and the result is clean. Over a coloured background, a scanned page or an image, the white patch shows.

Second, and more important: the original characters are still in the file, underneath the cover. A reader will not see them, but text extraction — copy-paste, a command-line tool, an automated pipeline — can still recover them. Correcting a typo or updating a date this way is perfectly fine. Making a name, an amount or an address disappear is not: for that, use redaction, which removes the text objects themselves instead of hiding them.

Frequently asked questions

Do the annotations stay in the PDF, or only in your viewer?
They are written into the file. On export, every annotation is drawn into the page content of a real PDF — highlights, freehand strokes, shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes alike. The result opens the same way in Adobe Reader, Preview, or any browser, with no plugin and no dependency on this site.
Can I edit the text that is already in the document?
Yes, with an important limit worth knowing. The text edit tool covers the original text with a white rectangle and writes your replacement on top. On a white page that is invisible; over a coloured background or an image, the white patch shows. And the original characters are still present in the file underneath — a reader will not see them, but text extraction can still recover them. If your goal is to make information disappear rather than to correct a wording, use redaction instead: it removes the text objects themselves.
Can I annotate a scanned document?
You can draw on it, yes — highlights, arrows, shapes and notes work on any page, since they are drawn over it. What you cannot do is select the underlying words, because a scan is an image and holds no text. Running OCR on it first turns the image into selectable text, and the whole toolset then behaves normally.
What shapes are available?
Rectangle, ellipse, triangle, straight line, arrow, cross and check mark, each with its own colour, thickness and line style — solid, dashed or dotted. Cross and check exist as their own tools because marking a form as accepted or rejected is common enough to deserve one click rather than a drawn shape.
Can I write comments without covering the document?
That is what sticky notes are for. The note sits as a small marker on the page and holds its text out of the way, so a long remark does not hide the paragraph it is about. Text boxes do the opposite: they place visible text directly on the page.
Does annotating change the rest of the document?
No. The original pages, their text and their images are kept as they are; the annotations are added on top. Page count, page size and existing content are untouched.
Can I fill in a form and annotate it in the same pass?
Yes — the editor holds form fields and annotations together, and both are written on export. You can complete the fields, highlight the clause you disagree with and add a note explaining why, then export one file carrying all three.
Do I need an account?
Yes — the editor opens on your own documents, so it sits behind sign-in. Creating an account is free and the free tier includes a daily allowance; paid plans raise the limits. See the pricing page for what your plan includes.

Start annotating

Annotation shares the editor with form filling and signing, so a document can be completed, marked up and signed in a single pass.

The editor works on your own documents, so it opens after sign-in. Creating an account is free.