How to Edit a PDF on Mac for Free (Preview and Beyond)

Can you edit a PDF on a Mac without Adobe Acrobat?

Yes. Preview, which is part of macOS, adds text, highlights, shapes and signatures, fills forms, and reorders, rotates and deletes pages. For white-out, images, redaction, page numbers and compression, free browser tools cover the rest.

The table shows which free option handles each common task. Apple documents every Preview feature in the Preview User Guide, which is worth a bookmark because menu names shift a little between macOS versions.

Add text, shapes and highlights in Preview

Open the PDF in Preview (double-click usually works; otherwise right-click > Open With > Preview).

• Click the Markup button (a pen tip inside a circle) to show the markup toolbar, or press Shift+Cmd+A.
• Click the T icon to add a text box. Drag it into place, then use the Aa button to change font, size and color.
• Use the highlighter button to highlight, underline or strike through selected text.
• Use the shapes button for rectangles, arrows, speech bubbles and the magnifier loupe.
• Choose File > Save. Preview writes the changes into the same file, so duplicate it first (File > Duplicate) if you want to keep the original.

Sign a PDF in Preview

Click the signature button in the markup toolbar, then Create Signature. You can sign on the trackpad with a finger, hold a signature written on white paper up to the camera, or use an iPhone nearby to draw it. The signature is saved in Preview for next time. Click it to place it, then drag the corners to resize.

This is a simple electronic signature: an image of your handwriting placed on the page. It is accepted for most everyday paperwork, but it is not a certificate-based digital signature, and Preview cannot create one. The Sign PDF tool on this site works the same way, with drawn, typed or image signatures, and is useful on a Mac that is not yours, since nothing is stored in the app afterwards.

Rearrange, delete and add pages

Choose View > Thumbnails. Drag thumbnails up or down to reorder pages, select one and press Delete to remove it, or drag another PDF from Finder into the sidebar to insert its pages. To rotate a sideways page, select it and press Cmd+R (right) or Cmd+L (left). Save when you are done.

One detail trips people up when combining files: drop the second PDF onto a thumbnail, or between two thumbnails, to add its pages to the same document. If you drop it below a divider line at the end of the sidebar, Preview opens it as a separate document in the same window and the save will not include it.

What can Preview not do?

Preview cannot change existing text, add page numbers or watermarks to every page, or compress reliably. It is an annotation tool, not a layout editor, so everything it adds sits on top of the original page.

• Change or retype existing text in the PDF. You can only place new text on top.
• Redact by drawing. A black rectangle hides text visually, but the text underneath can still be selected and copied. Recent macOS versions include a separate Redact tool under Tools, which does remove the selected text; a drawn shape does not.
• Add page numbers, watermarks or headers to every page at once.
• Compress reliably. The Reduce File Size filter in the export dialog often makes text-heavy PDFs blurry or even larger.
• Convert to Word. Preview exports to PDF and image formats only.

How do you change existing text in a PDF for free?

Cover the old words and type the new ones on top. True in-place editing is rarely possible, because a PDF stores positioned characters, not paragraphs, and usually embeds only the letters of each font that the document actually uses.

That second point comes from the way the format works. The PDF specification, ISO 32000, allows font subsetting to keep files small. If the embedded subset has no “7”, no editor can type a 7 in that font. Even expensive editors often substitute a different font when you change a word. For small fixes, such as a wrong date, a typo in a name or an outdated phone number, covering and retyping is the cleanest free approach.

Edit PDF on this site does exactly that in the browser: use the white-out tool to cover the old words, add a text box with a matching size and color, and press Save PDF. It also adds images, shapes, highlights and freehand drawing, with undo and redo. Everything runs in Safari or Chrome on the Mac, so the document is not uploaded, and files up to 100 MB are accepted.

When the edit is big, go back to the source

If you need to rewrite paragraphs, the PDF is the wrong starting point. Ask the sender for the original Word or Pages file. Failing that, PDF to Word rebuilds the text, headings and lists as a DOCX that opens in Pages; edit it there and export a new PDF. It works from the PDF's text layer, so tables and images are simplified, and for a scanned document you need to run OCR PDF first so the converter has text to work with.

Quick answers for common Mac tasks

• Fill in a form: click into the fields in Preview. If there are none, use the text tool, or Fill PDF Form for forms that Preview does not recognise.
• Combine two PDFs: open the first, show thumbnails, drag the second file onto a thumbnail in the sidebar, then File > Export as PDF.
• Make the file smaller: skip Preview's Quartz filter and use Compress PDF, which keeps text sharp.
• Lock it with a password: File > Export, click Permissions (on older macOS, tick Encrypt) and set a password to open the document.
• Trim wide margins: select an area with the rectangle tool and press Cmd+K. Preview warns that cropped content is hidden, not deleted. Crop PDF behaves the same way, because cropping only changes the visible page box.
• Save one page as a picture: File > Export and choose JPEG or PNG. For every page at once, PDF to JPG is quicker.

Troubleshooting Preview

A few problems come up again and again.