Edit Text — change or replace text in a PDF

Experimental feature: Enable Experimental features in Settings before using Edit Text.

Change the actual words in a PDF. RaioPDF rewrites the text in the document itself — not a box drawn on top, the real text. There are two ways to use it: find & replace across the whole document, or replace exactly the text you select on the page.

Why you'd use it

A wrong date slipped into a filing. A name is misspelled on every page. A placeholder like "[CLIENT]" never got filled in. Edit Text fixes those across the whole document at once, so you don't retype or re-export the file from the program that made it.

It works on typed (born-digital) PDFs — documents that already have real, selectable text. It is not for scanned documents (see What to know).

Method 1 — Find & replace across the document

1. Open the PDF.
2. In the Edit tools, choose Edit Text.
3. Type the text to Find and the text to Replace it with. Turn on Whole word if you only want to match the word on its own (so "art" doesn't also change "start").
4. Click Add replacement in the canvas bar. This queues the change — nothing happens to the document yet. Queue as many find/replace pairs as you need.
5. Click Review in the same canvas bar. RaioPDF reads the document and shows you what it found: which pages change, before-and-after previews, and any warnings.
6. If it looks right, click Apply. If nothing matched, Apply stays off and RaioPDF tells you the document wasn't changed.
7. Save. RaioPDF leaves your original file untouched and asks for a new file name, so you keep both the original and the edited copy.

Method 2 — Replace exactly the text you select

When you want to change one specific occurrence — not every match in the document:

1. Select the text on the page with the normal pointer.
2. Right-click the selection and choose "Replace text..." — RaioPDF opens a focused replacement bar with your selection already captured and the cursor in the Replace with box.
3. Type the replacement and click Review replacement. RaioPDF immediately stages that exact occurrence and opens a focused review — there is no sidebar step and no Add replacement action in this flow.
4. Confirm the selected page and before-and-after text, then click Apply. Only the exact text you selected changes — other occurrences of the same words are left alone.

Selection replacement works on one page and one line at a time. If the right-click option is grayed out, the page has no reliable text layer (a scan), or another replacement is still queued or being prepared.

While RaioPDF is reading the selection or building the review, it shows a progress dialog with a Cancel button. Cancel stops the local PDF engine and leaves the document unchanged.

What to know

• A selected edit can take a while to prepare. RaioPDF extracts, rebuilds, and verifies the affected page before it shows the review. That can take a while even though only one selection is changing; the progress dialog means the edit is still being prepared.
• The selection highlight is approximate during review. It can look wider, narrower, or slightly offset from the characters you selected because PDF text geometry does not always map cleanly to the visible words. Check the before-and-after text and inspect the result before saving.
• Typed PDFs only — not scans. A scanned document is a picture of a page, so there's no text to edit. RaioPDF turns the tool off for scanned documents rather than editing the hidden text layer and leaving the visible scan wrong.
• The text doesn't reflow. Replacing a long phrase with a short one (or the other way) does not re-wrap the paragraph. The words change; the layout around them stays put, so spacing can look tight or loose, and centered text can shift. Read the result before you rely on it.
• Matching is exact and case-sensitive. "Smith" and "smith" are different, and the find is literal text, not a search pattern.
• Single distinctive words match best. A multi-word phrase can be missed when the words are spaced apart on the page (common in justified text). If a phrase doesn't take, search for one unusual word from it instead. If RaioPDF says the words are separately positioned fragments, that means the text looks continuous on screen but is stored as independent pieces in the PDF. Nothing was changed.
• Selected edits stay page-local on large PDFs. In the installed app, RaioPDF extracts only the selected page, builds the review from that page, and splices the edited page back into a fresh copy of the original. Bulk find-and-replace still processes the whole document and remains limited on very large files.
• Selection replacement is one page, one line. A selection that spans pages or wraps across lines can't be replaced in one go — replace it line by line, or use find & replace. Right-to-left text isn't supported for selection replacement.
• Selected and bulk edits use different paths. A selected edit rebuilds only that page; bulk find-and-replace rebuilds the whole document. RaioPDF refuses the page-local path for forms, tagged PDFs, attachments, and annotations when it cannot verify that those structures will survive unchanged.
• A substitute font may fill in. If the document's font can't produce a character in your replacement, RaioPDF falls back to a built-in font, so a few characters can look a little different from the surrounding text.
• Pictures are kept as-is. On a document that mixes text and images, the images are carried over exactly — byte for byte — so editing text never re-compresses or degrades them.
• It can invalidate a digital signature. If the document is digitally signed, changing its text breaks that signature. RaioPDF warns you and only proceeds if you confirm.
• PDF/A gets a working-copy choice. PDF/A is an archival format designed not to change. RaioPDF asks before making a standard-PDF working copy, keeps the original file untouched, and lets you export the result as PDF/A again later.
• Your original is protected for you. Applying changes only the document open in RaioPDF; the file on your disk isn't touched until you save, and even then RaioPDF steers you to a new file rather than over the original.