Add real text on top
Place a text box anywhere on a scanned page and type. It is exported as genuine, selectable PDF text — not a picture of text — so it can be copied and searched in the finished file.
Editing problem
Editing a scanned PDF
You open a scanned contract, try to click a word, and nothing happens. Nothing is broken: the page is a photograph. The scanner produced an image and wrapped it in a PDF, and there is no text in the file for an editor to change.
Free — no signupNo watermarkNothing to installYour layout preserved
The short answer
A scanned PDF cannot have its text edited, because the page is a single image and the file contains no text objects to replace. You can still add text boxes, sign, highlight, annotate, draw and place or replace images on a scan. Editing the underlying words requires OCR, which converts the picture into text first.
A scan is an image, not textTest: try to select a wordText boxes, signatures, shapes all workHighlighting works on scansNo OCR here — stated up front
Why this happens
Rather than pretend otherwise, this page tells you how to confirm what you have, what you can genuinely do to a scanned page here, and where you will need a different kind of tool.
What the editor does about it
Sign a scanned document
Draw, type or upload a signature and place it where it belongs. This is the most common thing anyone actually needs to do with a scan.
Highlight without a text layer
Highlighting snaps to text lines when a text layer exists and falls back to a plain region on a scan, so the highlighter works on any page.
Draw, arrow and annotate
Rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows and freehand pen all work over a scanned image — the usual toolkit for marking up a document someone else has to act on.
Place or replace images
Drop a stamp, a logo or a corrected figure onto the page and position it. The scan behind it is not modified.
No OCR, and no pretending
This editor does not run OCR, so it will never hand you a page of confidently mis-recognised text that looks editable and is subtly wrong.
Step by step
Confirm it is actually a scan
Open the PDF and try to select a word by dragging across it. If you get a selection rectangle instead of highlighted characters, the page is an image. Searching for a word you can plainly see is the same test by another route.
Decide what you actually need
Most tasks on a scanned document are additive: sign it, date it, initial it, mark a clause, add a note. None of those need the underlying text to be editable.
Upload and work on top of the page
Use the text box, signature, highlight and drawing tools to put what you need onto the scan. The image itself is left exactly as it was.
Export
Download the PDF. Your additions are written into the file as real objects — the text you typed stays selectable text.
Side by side
What is possible on a scanned page versus a page that has a real text layer.
| Scanned page (an image) | Page with a text layer | |
|---|---|---|
| Edit the existing words | Not possible — there are none | Yes, replaced in place |
| Add text on top | Yes, as real selectable text | Yes |
| Sign and date | Yes | Yes |
| Highlight | Yes, as a region | Yes, snapped to text lines |
| Draw, arrow, annotate | Yes | Yes |
| Search the document | Only what you added | The whole document |
A PDF can also be mixed — a scanned page bound into an otherwise digital document. Test the specific page you need to change, not the file as a whole.
Where it stops — and says so
There is no OCR here
The editor will not convert the picture of your page into editable text. If you genuinely need to rewrite the body of a scanned contract, you need an OCR tool first, and you will need to proofread everything it produces — recognition errors in names, figures and reference numbers are the expensive kind.
Redacting into a scan removes the whole page image
A raster image cannot be partially cropped, so the only compliant way to guarantee covered pixels are gone is to drop the image entirely. On a page that is one big scan, that means the page content is removed and replaced with the redaction mark. Use it deliberately, and cover with a drawn shape instead when you want the page to survive.
A drawn box is not a redaction
Drawing a filled black rectangle over a scanned name hides it on screen while the pixels remain in the file, recoverable by anyone who extracts the image. For anything sensitive, that is not good enough.
Get it right the first time
Check page by page in a mixed document
Scanned signature pages are often bound into digital contracts. The rest of the file may be perfectly editable even when the page in front of you is not.
Ask for the digital original before you fight the scan
It is one email and it usually arrives. Working from the source PDF beats every workaround on this page.
Add text rather than trying to match the scan
A typed note in a clean font reads as a deliberate annotation. Trying to imitate scanner-blurred type never convinces anyone and takes far longer.
Scan quality decides everything downstream
If you control the scanner, 300 DPI, straight, and in a real PDF rather than a photo of a screen. Every later step — reading it, OCR-ing it elsewhere, printing it — depends on this one.
Frequently asked questions
You can add to it, but you cannot edit the words already on it. A scan is a photograph of a page stored inside a PDF wrapper, so the file contains image data and no text objects. There is nothing for an editor to select and replace. Adding text boxes, signatures, highlights, drawings and images all work normally, because those create new objects rather than modifying existing ones.
Try to select a single word with your cursor. On a normal PDF the characters highlight; on a scan you get a rectangular selection over an image, or nothing at all. A second test is to search for a word you can clearly see on the page — if the search finds nothing, there is no text layer.
Usually because the page is an image with no text layer, which is what a scanner produces. Two other causes are worth knowing: the document may use a font encoding that copies out as nonsense rather than words, and some PDFs set permission flags that ask readers to block copying. The free PDF Font Checker on this site will tell you which of the three you are looking at.
No. It does not run OCR and does not claim to. That is a deliberate choice: OCR output on a contract or an invoice needs line-by-line proofreading, and an editor that silently hands you recognised text invites you to trust figures no one has checked.
Yes. Place a text box anywhere on the page and type. It is exported as real PDF text, so it stays selectable and searchable in the downloaded file rather than becoming another picture of text.
Yes, and it is the most common reason people come to a scan at all. Draw, type or upload your signature, place and size it where it belongs, and export. The scanned page underneath is unchanged.
Understand the trade-off first. Drawing a filled rectangle covers the area on screen but leaves the pixels in the file, where anyone can extract them. A true redaction removes the covered content — but because a raster image cannot be partially cropped, redacting into a full-page scan removes that page image entirely. For sensitive scans, redacting and then re-inserting a cleaned image is safer than trusting a drawn box.
Because every page is a full-resolution photograph rather than a few kilobytes of text instructions. Compression helps considerably on scans, since image data is exactly what a PDF compressor can work on.
Tools and guides that go deeper
Other editing problems, solved
Every one of these opens the same free online PDF editor — each page covers what makes that particular problem hard, and what to do about it.
Edit a PDF without losing its formatting
To edit a PDF without losing formatting, edit the PDF itself instead of converting it to Word and back.
Replace an image in a PDF
To replace an image in a PDF, open the file, switch to the image tool, click the picture you want to change, and choose Replace to upload a new JPG or PNG.
Editing a protected PDF
A protected PDF must be unlocked before it can be edited, because its contents are encrypted.
Edit PDF text
Change the text already in your PDF without converting it to Word.
Ready when you are
Free, no signup, no watermark, nothing to install — and no round trip through another file format to get your document back.
Open the PDF editor