How to Edit a PDF on a Mac: What Preview Can Do and Where It Stops

What Preview can and can't do

How to mark up a PDF in Preview

1. Double-click the PDF. If another app opens it, Control-click the file and choose Open With, then Preview.
2. Click the Show Markup Toolbar button.
3. Choose Text to add a text box, then drag it into place. Use Text Style to set the font and size.
4. Choose Sign to add a saved signature, or create one with the trackpad or the camera.
5. Choose File, then Save. Preview writes the changes into the same file, so duplicate it first if you want to keep the original.

How to change the actual text on a Mac

Preview's Text Selection tool lets you select words and delete them, which tempts people into deleting a line and adding a text box over the gap. That can work for a simple change, but the replacement won't match the original font, and it is easy to leave the spacing visibly wrong.

A cleaner route is to edit the line where it sits. Open Edit PDF in your browser, drop in the file, click the line and type the correction. The tool removes the old characters and draws the new ones, using the document's own font when it can be read. There is nothing to install, which suits a borrowed or work Mac where you can't add apps. Hit Download and the new copy lands in your Downloads folder.

We should be clear about our testing. We run this editor in Chromium-based browsers on Windows, so Chrome or Edge on a Mac is the closest match to what we test. We have not run the full test set in Safari on a Mac. If something looks wrong in Safari, try Chrome before you assume the file is at fault, and open the downloaded copy to check it.

When to use Pages or Word instead

When a document needs real rewriting rather than a few corrections, editing the PDF is the wrong approach. Find the source file if you can, because that gives you a far better result than any conversion. If there is no source, turn the PDF into a Word file with PDF to Word and open it in Word or Pages.

Expect some clean-up afterwards. Microsoft warns that spaced tables, page borders and multi-page footnotes are the parts that tend to convert badly, and a converted file is a rebuilt document rather than the original. Check every page before you export a new PDF.

Scanned documents on a Mac

If your scanner or the Notes app produced the PDF, each page is a picture, so there are no words to change. Preview will let you write on top of it, but not fix what is printed. OCR PDF adds a searchable layer, and the editor can recognise a page so that you can retype a line. Our guide to editing scanned PDFs explains the limits of that.

Do you need a PDF editor app for Mac?

Search for a PDF editor for Mac and you will find plenty of paid apps and free downloads. An app makes sense if you edit long documents every week, work offline or need to reflow paragraphs. For an occasional fix, it is one more thing to install and keep updated. Before you download a free editor, look at what it does with your file, and check whether saving adds a watermark or asks for an account.

Which option should you pick?

• Signing, ticking boxes or leaving comments: stay in Preview. It is already on your Mac and it is good at this.
• Fixing a typo, date, price or name: use a browser editor, because Preview cannot do it.
• Sensitive redaction: Preview's redaction is permanent once the document closes, and Redact PDF is a browser alternative. Either way, check the result by searching the final file.
• Editing PDFs all day: paid desktop software will save you time, and Adobe offers a 7-day trial of Acrobat Pro if you want to compare.

Frequently asked questions