Most "edit PDF online" tools want your file on their server first. PhantomEtch does the work inside your browser tab. Here is exactly what you can change, the steps, the limits, and the price.
Editing a PDF in PhantomEtch means placing new things on top of the pages: text boxes, highlights, underlines and strikethroughs, freehand drawing, lines, arrows, rectangles, ellipses, sticky notes, stamps, images and signatures. The editor does this in your browser tab with the PDF held in memory, and the Save button builds the new file on your own machine.
Skip to the numbered steps if you just want to get moving, or read the limits section first if you are deciding whether this is the right kind of tool for your document.
People type "edit PDF" into a search box and mean at least four different things, and the right tool depends on which one you mean. Being precise about it saves you a wasted afternoon.
Marking up is adding information to a finished page: a highlight over a clause, a note beside a number, a circle around a date, a line of text in a blank margin. Filling in is typing into form fields that the author built into the file, which we cover in our guide to filling out PDF forms. Restructuring is changing which pages exist and in what orientation: deleting, extracting, rotating, merging. Rewriting is changing the words that are already on the page, the thing a word processor does without thinking.
PhantomEtch covers the first three well. It does not do the fourth. A PDF is not a document in the word-processor sense; it is a set of drawing instructions that put glyphs at coordinates on a page. There is no paragraph to reflow. Tools that advertise rewriting existing text are either re-flowing the page behind the scenes, which can shift your layout, or covering the old words and drawing new ones over them. PhantomEtch takes the honest, simpler route: it lets you draw new things on the page, and it tells you that is what it is doing.
That distinction matters when you choose a workflow. If the source document exists as a Word file, a Google Doc or a spreadsheet, change it there and export a fresh PDF. If all you have is the PDF, which is the usual situation with signed contracts, scanned letters and files someone else sent you, marking up is almost always what you need anyway.
An upload-first editor works like this: your browser sends the whole file to a server, the server processes it, and you download the result. For a restaurant menu that is fine. For a lease, a tax form, a medical report or a client contract, you have just handed a complete copy to a company whose retention policy you have probably not read.
In PhantomEtch, the page is rendered by a PDF library running in your browser, and when you press Save a second library, pdf-lib, assembles the new file in the same tab and hands it to the browser as a download. We read that code path before writing this guide: the Save routine loads the bytes already in memory, draws your annotations onto the pages, and creates a download link from a local blob. The bytes of your PDF are not sent anywhere along that path.
Two honest footnotes. First, the editor does load its own scripts and fonts from the internet when you open it, and it sends small, anonymous usage events to our analytics, as every site does. Those are about the page, not your file. Second, the optional AI panel does send text extracted from your PDF to a server so that a language model can summarize it. It is off until you open it, and none of the steps below touch it. If your document is sensitive, leave that panel alone.
"Nothing is uploaded" is also a practical advantage that has nothing to do with privacy: there is no upload queue, no file-size limit imposed by someone's server, and no waiting for a progress bar on a slow connection. The ceiling is your own machine's memory.
These steps use keyboard shortcuts where the app has them. Every tool is also in the toolbar, so you never need to memorise a key.
Ctrl+O or use File, then Open. If the file is password-protected, the editor asks for the password before it will show you anything.T) and click where the text should go. Type. Choose a font from the toolbar (Sans-serif, Serif, Monospace, Arial, Times, Courier, Verdana), a size from 12px upward, a colour from the presets (black, grey, red, blue, green), and toggle bold or italic with the B and I buttons.L). It has three modes: highlight, underline and strikethrough. Drag across the text and release.D) is freehand with a choice of colour and thickness. The Insert menu holds shapes (rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow), sticky notes, stamps and image insertion.V), click an item, and drag it. Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes, and the Eraser (E) removes annotations you drew.Ctrl+S or the Save button. The browser downloads a new file named after the original with _edited added before .pdf. Your original file is never touched.Nothing in that list needed an account until step three. You can open the editor, load a file and read it without signing up for anything.
This is the practical map of what you can add to a page, how to reach it, and what ends up in the saved file.
| You want to | Use | Shortcut | In the saved PDF |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type a new line of text | Text tool | T | Real text, in a Helvetica, Times or Courier family, bold and italic supported |
| Highlight, underline or strike through | Highlight tool | L | Coloured rectangles and lines drawn on the page |
| Scribble or circle something | Draw tool | D | Vector strokes in the colour and thickness you chose |
| Draw a box, ellipse, line or arrow | Shape tools (Insert menu) | Menu only | Vector shapes |
| Leave a comment on a spot | Sticky note | N (Insert menu) | A small note marker with your text, drawn onto the page |
| Stamp APPROVED, DRAFT or a date | Stamp | S (Insert menu) | Stamp text placed where you click |
| Place a logo or picture | Insert image | I | Embedded image |
| Add a signature | Sign tool | G | Image of the signature you drew, typed or uploaded |
Two notes on the table. The saved text uses standard PDF fonts, so Verdana in the toolbar preview becomes the closest standard family in the output. If an exact typeface matters, open the saved file and compare before you send it. And signatures have their own walkthrough in our sign a PDF guide.
An editor is only pleasant to use if mistakes are cheap, and this one has four layers of forgiveness.
Undo and redo step through your actions one at a time, including page deletions and rotations, not just annotations. The Eraser highlights an annotation as you hover over it and removes that one item, which is faster than undoing five steps to reach it. Version history (Ctrl+H, or Tools, then History) records named snapshots as you work, such as "Deleted page 3" or "Applied form field values", and lets you preview or restore one. Autosave keeps a working copy in your browser's own storage so a closed tab or a crash does not lose the session; when you reopen the editor within a day it offers Restore or Discard.
That autosave copy lives inside your browser profile on your machine. It is local convenience, not cloud sync, so it will not follow you to another device, and clearing site data removes it. Do not treat it as a backup of an important document; keep your original file.
The practical habit that follows from all this: work non-destructively and save once at the end. Because the editor draws your marks over the original pages and only bakes them into a new file at Save, you can experiment freely and still have the pristine original on disk the whole time.
A guide that only lists strengths is an advertisement, so here are the limits, stated plainly.
It cannot change existing text. Covered above, but it is the number one surprise. To correct a typo in someone else's PDF you can draw a white rectangle over the old word and place a text box on top. That works visually, and it also leaves the old word in the file underneath, where a text search or copy-paste can still find it. If you are hiding something sensitive, covering is not removing; use the redaction tools, which we explain in how to redact a PDF.
It cannot add or change a password. PhantomEtch will open a password-protected PDF if you type the password. Setting a password on a file is outside what it does today. The same goes for adding page numbers and for pulling embedded images out of a PDF as separate files; we would rather tell you now than have you buy a trial to find out.
It is not a layout tool. There is no text reflow, no columns, no paragraph styles. A text box is a box of lines you control. For a long block, expect to press Enter for line breaks yourself.
Scanned documents are pictures. If your PDF is a scan, there is no text to highlight until you run OCR, which makes the page searchable. OCR is a separate tool; see our OCR guide. The engine loads in the browser and reads the pages there, which keeps the file on your machine.
Very large files depend on your hardware. Because processing happens in the tab, a several-hundred-page scan will use real memory. We have not published a size limit, because we have not measured one we would stand behind; if you hit trouble, extract the pages you need first, which is quick and described in our extract pages guide.
Here is the plain version, because PDF tools are famous for hiding it. Viewing a PDF in PhantomEtch is free. The free plan covers viewing, the basic tools (rotate, reorder, delete pages, merge, fill forms, add text, sign) and 2 clean, unwatermarked saves a day. Some of the tools in this guide are on that free plan (add text, sign) and some are Pro tools (highlight, shapes, stamps, notes, images); the guide says which. Pro is a 30-day free trial, then $6.99/mo, with a card at checkout; it lifts the save limit and adds the rest of the tools (highlight, draw, shapes, stamps, images, watermark, extract pages, compress, OCR, redaction, compare, version history). You enter your email, a Stripe checkout link arrives by email, and that page asks for a card before the 30 days begin, so you are choosing to start a subscription; the account bar has a Manage link that opens the Stripe billing portal where you can cancel. We are not going to call that "free" and then tuck the card step into a footnote.
Add text and sign are on the free plan; highlights, shapes, notes, stamps and images are Pro tools. The practical path: open a PDF to see whether the viewer shows it correctly, do what you can with text and signatures for free, and start the trial when you need a Pro tool. Because the trial takes a card, set yourself a reminder for day 25 if you only need it once.
About the saved file: Save downloads a new _edited.pdf, and the original on your disk is untouched. In the editor's code, Save on the free plan is metered (2 a day), and those saves are clean; after the second one, Save opens the upgrade prompt. A Pro save is clean too. What does carry our faint grey nullagency.io watermark is printing from the free plan, so print is not a way around the save limit. Open any file you plan to send and check it anyway. We would rather you hear that here than discover it in an email to your landlord.
PhantomEtch is a browser-based PDF editor for exactly the jobs above: text, highlights, shapes, notes, stamps and signatures, built and saved locally. Viewing is free; add text and sign are on the free plan with 2 clean saves a day. Highlights, shapes, notes, stamps and images are Pro: a 30-day free trial, then $6.99/mo, with a card at checkout. Printing from the free plan carries our mark, so save a file instead, and look at the output before you send it.
Open PhantomEtch See how it comparesDetect fields, type, tick boxes, then flatten
One page, a range, or a handful, with undo
Split pages 1-3, 5 and 7-9 into a new file
Draw, type or upload a signature and place it
Disclosure: PhantomEtch is built by Null Agency, the publisher of this site, so we are not a neutral party about our own product. Everything above describes what the editor does today, including the parts that cost money or leave a mark on a saved file. We name other PDF tools only by category, and we quote no prices for them; check each vendor for current terms.