Add text to a PDF
Click anywhere on a PDF and start typing — ideal for scanned forms with no fields. Eight built-in fonts, any size, any colour, no upload.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
Click anywhere on the page and start typing. Ideal for filling in a scanned form that has no real form fields. Everything happens in this browser tab — you can turn off your network connection first and it will still work.
Typing onto a PDF that has no form fields
A great many of the forms people are asked to complete are not forms at all. They are pictures of paper: a scan, a fax, or an export from a design tool that never had interactive fields. There is nothing to click into, so the usual advice is to print it, fill it by hand and scan it back — three steps, a printer, and a worse-looking result.
This tool skips all of that. Click where a value belongs, type it, position it precisely, and download a PDF with real, selectable text sitting on the printed line.
Getting text onto the line, exactly
- Zoom to 200% with the plus button so you can see the printed rule clearly.
- Click just above the line, roughly where the first letter goes.
- Type into the text box in the panel underneath. Press Enter for a second line.
- With the object focused, tap the arrow keys. Each press moves it one point — 1/72 inch — and Shift with an arrow moves ten. Two or three presses is usually the whole difference between "floating" and "written on the line".
- Match the size to the surrounding print: 10 pt for most forms, 11–12 pt for large-print forms, 8–9 pt for dense tables.
Which font to pick
| The form looks like | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Arial or Helvetica | Helvetica | Metrically near-identical to Arial; the default for government forms |
| Times New Roman or a book face | Times Roman | Same proportions, same look at small sizes |
| Typewritten or monospaced | Courier | Fixed pitch, lines up in boxed character grids |
| Handwritten original | Times Italic | Softer than a sans face; or draw it instead with Edit PDF |
All eight faces are among the fourteen fonts every PDF reader is required to have built in, so nothing is embedded, the file grows by only the bytes of your text, and it renders the same on every device.
The character-set limit, stated plainly
The built-in fonts cover WinAnsi — the Western European set. That is A–Z, digits, punctuation, and accented Latin letters like é, ñ, ü, ç and å. It does not include Polish ł, Turkish ğ, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, or the curly quotes some word processors substitute automatically.
Rather than writing a file where those characters silently become blanks, the tool names the offending character and stops. The way round it is to render the text as a transparent PNG in any image editor and place it with Add Image to PDF.
Filling a boxed character grid
Forms that give one small box per character — common on visa, bank and tax paperwork — need Courier and a little arithmetic. Measure the pitch of the boxes by placing a character in the first and last box of a run and reading the coordinates in the panel; divide by the number of boxes to get the spacing. Then place each character as its own text object at that spacing. It is fiddly, but it produces a form that a scanner will read, which handwriting frequently does not.
If the PDF does have fields
Try Fill Out PDF Forms first. It detects AcroForm fields, shows an input on top of each one, and can save either an editable or a flattened copy — which is faster and more reliable than typing free text on top of a real form. Come back here when that tool reports no fields.
Questions
The form I have is a scan with no fields — will this work?
That is exactly the case this tool is for. A scanned form is a picture of paper: there are no fields to fill because there is no form, only pixels. Click on the line where a name or date belongs and type. Zoom in with the plus button to line the baseline up neatly with the printed rule.
How do I get the text to sit on the line?
Click roughly where you want it, then nudge with the arrow keys — one point per press, ten points with Shift held. One point is 1/72 inch, so a couple of presses is the difference between "floating" and "sitting on the rule". The panel shows the exact coordinates while you do it.
Why can I not type an accented or non-Latin character?
The built-in PDF fonts cover the WinAnsi character set — Western European letters, digits and common punctuation. Anything outside it, including Polish ł, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and all CJK, would need a font file embedded in the document. We tell you which character is the problem instead of writing a file that renders as blanks.
Can I match the font of the printed form?
Approximately. Most official forms are set in Helvetica or Arial, which the built-in Helvetica matches closely, or Times New Roman, which Times Roman matches. Courier is right for anything that looks typewritten. Perfect matching would require identifying and embedding the original font, which nothing can do reliably from a scan.
Is the typed text selectable afterwards?
Yes. It is drawn as real text with a real font, so it can be selected, copied and found with Ctrl+F in the finished PDF — unlike tools that flatten your typing into an image.