Annotate or draw on a PDF online — free, and your text stays text
Mark up a PDF in the browser and download it with a real annotation layer, so the page underneath is still selectable and searchable.
Drop a file here
PDF, up to 100 pages and 25 MB
Your file never leaves your browser unless you click Share.
Open a PDF above, mark it up, and download it. No account, no watermark, and nothing is uploaded unless you press Share.
The part worth knowing: this writes real PDF annotations. Most free web tools render your document to images, draw on the images and hand back a picture of a PDF — the text stops being text, the file gets bigger, and a printer gets a screenshot instead of a document. Here the page underneath is untouched. Your text is still selectable, still searchable, still print-ready, and each mark is an object the person you send it to can click, read and delete.
What you can add
Box and ellipse — written as Square and Circle annotations.
Arrow — a Line annotation with a filled head where the drag ended.
Pen — freehand, written as an Ink annotation.
Text — a FreeText box, wrapped to the box you drew.
Highlight — a translucent band over a region.
Sticky note — a numbered pin carrying a sentence, written as a Text annotation with a popup, so Acrobat, Preview and your browser all show the note when it is clicked.
Every one carries its own appearance stream, which is the boring detail that decides whether a marked-up PDF looks right in the reader your client happens to use. Acrobat can invent a missing appearance; Preview and browser viewers cannot, and show a blank page instead. Ours are written explicitly for that reason.
Drawing freehand
The pen is there for everything a shape will not say: circling something that is not a rectangle, ticking an item off, a correction scribbled in the margin, a signature in the loose sense of the word. It is written into the file as an Ink annotation, so the drawing stays a drawing at any zoom and can be removed by whoever receives it.
It is the wrong tool for anything you want somebody to read back. A sentence written with a mouse is a sentence nobody can read — use Text for words on the page, or a sticky note for a remark pinned to a spot.
Three stroke weights, five colours. The colours mean nothing on purpose: they exist so six marks on one busy page can be told apart, and so a mark laid over artwork of a similar colour can be moved to one that shows.
Multi-page files
The page strip runs along the bottom. Marks belong to the page you drew them on, and every tool works on every page. Files up to 100 pages and 25 MB are accepted. If the question is whether the file will print well rather than what is on it, the PDF dpi checker reads the resolution of every image inside it and names the page each soft one is on.
What you cannot do here, and why
There is no blur tool on this page. Blurring a PDF would draw a grey rectangle over the words — and leave the words underneath, selectable and copyable by anybody who opens the file. That is a redaction that fails silently, which is worse than no redaction at all. If you need to hide something in a document, screenshot the page and use annotate an image, where blur destroys the pixels for real.
Sending it to somebody who has to answer it
A marked-up PDF in an inbox is still an attachment somebody has to open, act on, and reply about — and the reply is where approvals get lost. "Looks good" arrives four days later without saying which version it is about, and two weeks after that nobody can prove anything was approved at all.
Proofavo is the same marking-up with the answer attached: one link per project, comments pinned to the exact version, and an approval recorded against the file it was given for. Press Share and this drawing becomes that link.
- One link per project
- Comments pinned to the exact version
- Approval recorded against the file
Frequently asked questions
Real. Download rewrites your own PDF with an annotation layer — Square, Circle, Ink, Line, FreeText and Text annotations — and leaves the page content untouched. The only place anything is flattened is Share, and that is deliberate: a shared file is served from our domain to somebody else, so we re-render it rather than host a stranger's original bytes.
No. Opening, drawing and downloading all happen in your browser. Share is the only thing that uploads, and it says so first.
Yes — and in macOS Preview, in Chrome and Firefox's built-in viewers, and in the browser you are reading this in. That is why every annotation is written with its own appearance stream instead of leaving the reader to guess.
Often the right answer for one file on your own machine. Acrobat Reader, macOS Preview, Edge and Google Drive all annotate a PDF for nothing, and each has a different catch; how to comment on a PDF sets them side by side. This page is for the times you do not want to install anything, or the file is not yours to upload.
Yes. They are ordinary PDF annotations, so any reader that can edit annotations can move or remove them. If you want marks that cannot be quietly deleted from a proof, that is what a review link is for.
100 pages, and 25 MB, which is the same ceiling our proofing pipeline uses. Bigger than that and the browser starts doing the file more harm than good.
Yes. The pen follows touch and stylus input as well as a mouse, and the editor zooms so you can work on a detail.
No. This adds annotations on top of a page; it does not fill form fields. A PDF with real form fields is best filled in the reader you already have.