How to add text to a PDF

How to add text to a PDF, step by step

Adding text to a PDF is for filling in a field on a printed form, putting a reference in a corner, or marking a document with a note. It takes under a minute:

1. Open the Add text tool.
2. Drag the PDF into the window, or click to pick it.
3. Type the line, choose which pages it appears on, and say where it goes with two numbers.
4. Press apply and download the PDF with the text in place.

Nothing to install, no account and no upload wait. The result appears instantly, with the text in place and the rest of the page untouched.

Where the text goes: coordinates counted from the top left corner

The position of the text is given with two numbers. The first goes right and the second goes down, counted from the TOP left corner of the page, like a screen, the PDF format internally counts the other way, from the bottom up, but nobody thinks like that when looking at a sheet of paper. If you have worked with PDFs programmatically, this is the difference you will notice. The second number points at the top of the letters, not the line they sit on, so that writing zero puts the text against the top margin instead of half off the sheet.

The numbers can be in millimetres, points or percentage. Percentage is what you want when the document has sheets of different sizes: 50 and 50 in percentage starts the text in the middle of any page, be it A4 or A3. Note that this is where the text begins and not its centre: the line runs from there to the right, and a long one may cross the margin and be refused. The angle, if you want to write diagonally or vertically along the margin, rotates around the point where the text starts, not the centre of the line, which you need to allow for when positioning.

Tips for adding text to a PDF

• If the tool refuses because the text does not fit, adjust the position or the size. It refuses rather than shrinking the font, and that is deliberate: the coordinates and the size were written by you, and reducing the font to make it fit would ruin the alignment without warning. The check accounts for the angle: a line that fits horizontally may not fit at 90 degrees, because it then takes up the page height instead of the width.
• Avoid emoji, arrows and scripts outside Western Latin. The typeface in use cannot write them, so the tool refuses the text instead of silently swapping those characters for question marks. Portuguese and Spanish accents work without trouble.
• The text is added on top of the page. The tool does not touch what is already in the PDF and writes where it is told: if the spot is taken by content, pick another. Editing existing text is a different and considerably harder problem, because the format stores positions rather than paragraphs.
• There is no preview. The practical way is to apply once with rough values, open the result and adjust.
• It works offline. Once the page has loaded once, you can add text with the network off, the work is all done by your processor, and the file never leaves your computer.
• For a signature, use the Sign PDF tool. This one writes text; a drawn signature or an image has an editor of its own in the signing tool. For a line at the top and bottom of every page, see Header and footer; for a logo or stamp at an exact spot, Add image.

Is adding text to a PDF free? What are the limits?

No. This tool is part of the Premium subscription, EUR 1.99 a month, which removes the limits on every tool and adds OCR. Sign PDF opens on the free plan, with one signature a day.

Sources

• BestPDFInTheWorld, Inserir texto
• MDN, File API
• pdf-lib