Can I edit the text inside a PDF?

A PDF stores where each piece of text sits on the page, not a paragraph you can reflow. Shortening a sentence in the middle of a paragraph therefore does not pull the following lines up ? the rest stays exactly where it was, and you get a gap. Adding words pushes them under whatever is next.

That is why every editor, ours included, works in layers: new text boxes, images and shapes placed over the page, plus whiteout to hide what should go. The original text is not a stream you can retype.

Typo fixes inside a text box, replacing a name or a date, covering a figure with a whiteout box and retyping it, adding a clause or a signature line, and deleting a whole item by whiteout rather than trying to close the gap.

• Small, local changes look native because the surrounding text does not move.
• Long rewrites look like patches. Regenerate the document from the original source instead.
• For a scanned page there is no text to edit at all until OCR has read it.

A scan is a picture of a page. OCR adds a text layer so the words become selectable and searchable, which is what makes editing possible afterwards. The layer follows the picture, so scanning at a higher resolution is the single biggest quality lever.