Edit existing PDF text
You need to fix a typo, update a date, or change a line of text directly on the PDF page.
Editing is still in beta, so a few edge-case text changes may act up. Feedback helps refine it across more document types.
- Click on a line of text in the canvas. If Orifold detects it as editable text, it becomes an inline text field.
- Type your changes.
- Click elsewhere to commit the edit.
“Detected text” means text Orifold’s reader can identify directly in the PDF’s content stream. Scanned pages have no such text — run OCR first, then the recognized text becomes editable the same way.
Complex layouts (multi-column text, text wrapped around images) may not detect cleanly. If a line won’t activate for editing, try adding a new text box over it instead.
Inline text edits can coexist with object edits in the same document. Orifold regenerates both operation sets together, including after save and reopen.
Ori’s note: a scan is a picture of text, not text. Run OCR first — then the recognized text activates for editing just like any other.
What you should see
Section titled “What you should see”The edited text renders in place on the page, in a font as close to the original as Orifold’s engine can match.
How editing keeps the original text layer intact
Orifold measures where each glyph sits from PDFium’s real transforms and imports through a text-layer-preserving normalizer, so an edit lands exactly on the text it replaces rather than on top of an invisible copy. The Developer FAQ has the full “edit lands on top” history.
Editing text replaces what’s drawn on the page — it does not cryptographically remove the original content from the PDF file. If you need to permanently destroy sensitive text (not just cover or replace it), don’t rely on inline editing alone.