How to Edit a PDF File on macOS

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to display documents in an electronic form. You can view, print, navigate, and send the PDF file to someone else easily. PDFs can contain buttons and links, form fields, video, audio, and images. However, PDFs are typically used to distribute read-only documents and sometimes users will need to edit some of the changes in the PDF file. In this article, we will provide some available methods for your macOS, where you can edit your PDFs without any issue.

PDF Files on macOS

PDFs are independent and you can open them on any operating system. We have a default application “Preview” on macOS to read and do some basic editing for your PDF files, which is similar to “Reader” on Windows OS but with much more features.

Method 1: Editing PDF by Using the Preview on macOS

As this is the default PDF application for macOS, we will give all the details about available editing options on Preview. Follow the steps below to check which editing options are possible with preview:

Highlight Text in PDF:

1. Open the PDF file by double-clicking, which will by default open in Preview
2. Select Text you want to Highlight, and click on the Highlight button or choose any color from the drop-down menu. You can also underline or strikethrough the selected text with the same option.

   

Add Text in PDF:

1. Open the PDF file by double-clicking, which will by default open in Preview
2. Click on Tools in the menu bar, and choose Annotate > Text

   

3. This will insert the Text in PDF page that you selected, you can double-click the Text to edit and you can drag the Text anywhere you want.
4. This option will also show the markup toolbar (or you can simply click the markup toolbar button) where you can use the other options for editing the text or other features as shown below:

   

Edit the Pages in PDF:

1. Open the PDF file by double-clicking, which will by default open in Preview
2. Click on the View Menu button and choose Thumbnails

   

3. You can rearrange pages by dragging them around in the thumbnail sidebar
4. To rotate a page, select that page in the thumbnails sidebar, then click on Tools and choose Rotate Left or Rotate Right to rotate

   

5. To delete a page, select page in thumbnail sidebar then click on Edit and choose Delete or you can simply click Delete button on the keyboard.

   

Combine and Split PDF Pages:

1. Open the PDF file by double-clicking, which will by default open in Preview
2. Click on Edit in the menu bar and choose Insert > Page from File
   
3. Locate the PDF file which you want to combine and open it

   

4. To split pages on PDF, just drag page in thumbnail sidebar and drop on desktop or anywhere you want to save.

Method 2: Editing a PDF File Online

Online editing is a quick method to apply for any task; it saves both storage and time for the user. Many online sites offer the PDF Editor to edit PDF files easily. User needs to upload the PDF file, edit it online and then save it back to their system. For this method, we will be using the Sejda site, which has good features for editing documents.

1. First, open the Sejda website’s Online PDF Editor page
2. Now drag and drop your PDF file anywhere on the page or you can click the drop-down button to upload through URL or file hosting services.

   

3. After the file is uploaded, you can add more text to your PDF, edit the existing text, add Images, add links, and many more.
   Note: When you double-click the text to edit, it will change the format to the editor format. Make sure you choose/change the format of text to your PDF text.

   

4. When you are done editing, click on Apply Changes and it will give you a download link after processing the changes.

   

Method 3: Convert PDF to Word File and Edit on macOS

To convert PDF to Word and then edit the document in Microsoft Word, you can check our article: Convert PDF to Word Mac

Method 4: Using a PDF Editor on macOS

There is a huge number of PDF editors for macOS that you can download and install. Most of them will offer what the default Preview application is providing and some will offer additional features, which can be what you are looking for. Some of the best PDF Editors are PDF Expert, Adobe Acrobat Pro, PDFelement and more. In this method, we will be using PDFelement as shown below:

Install PDFelement from their official site: PDFelement

1. Hold Command key and Press Space to open Spotlight, now type PDFelement and Enter

   

2. Click on Edit PDF in PDFelement main screen, and locate the file to Open
   

   

3. Now you can edit the PDF with all available features on PDFelement

   

4. Once you are done editing, click on File and choose Save As, then name the file and click Save.