Edit & Redact PDF Text in Place | Kern

Edit and redact PDF text in place, in the document's own fonts — and see exactly what changed. Nothing uploads.

Kern edits the text already inside your PDF, in the document's own embedded fonts — so a corrected line matches the ones around it. It tells you the truth about every change: what stayed exact, what it nudged, and what it refused. Nothing uploads. Most PDF editors don't edit your PDF. They stamp a text box over it in a font that isn't yours, and hope you don't look too closely. Kern is the one that doesn't — and the one that admits what it could not do. EDIT THE TEXT THAT'S THERE • Click any line and type — no mode to enter, no text boxes stamped on top • Uses the document's own embedded fonts, so edits match the original • A running list of every change and whether it stayed exact • When the document's font can't set a character you typed, Kern refuses — then offers a face that can, preferring one the file already has, and records which you chose • Draw a box around a paragraph to let text re-wrap inside it, and nowhere else • Change the colour, size or typeface of text already in the file — and when you change the typeface, the fonts your document already contains are offered first, with Kern's own clearly marked as an addition to it • Kern tells you before you commit if larger text will overrun its line or land on its neighbour ADD TO THE PAGE • Click anywhere and type — new text takes the size and font of the text around it, and says which, before you type a word • Set the size, font, colour and angle of anything you add • Draw boxes, place images, and put either behind existing content • Read a scanned page — recognition runs on your device, and makes the words searchable and copyable without ever claiming a picture became editable text • Sign it — draw your name once, keep it on your device, then place it by clicking or by dragging a box to the size you want. Select it afterwards to move it or drag a corner to resize. Handwriting, not certificates: Kern does no cryptographic signing and sends nothing anywhere • Headers, footers, page numbers and watermarks across every page at once MARK IT UP • Highlight, underline, strike through, and leave sticky notes — as real PDF annotations any reader can see REDACT PROPERLY • Kern removes the words from the file rather than drawing a black box over them, then reads the page back to confirm they're gone. A black rectangle is a picture of a redaction; the text underneath is still there and still copyable. REARRANGE THE DOCUMENT • Delete, reorder, rotate, insert and crop pages • Split a document, or merge another PDF into it • Save a copy as images — one page or all of them, in a zip — or as a plain text file • Change a phrase across many files at once, with a row per file saying what happened to each — including the ones it could not read • Compare two versions and see what changed, line by line — and it tells you it compared the words and not the pictures, rather than implying it checked everything • Move or resize anything — text, a logo, a rule — by drawing a box around it • Scale a whole page down when a document won't quite fit • Fill form fields EVERYWHERE ELSE • Exports are packed the way modern PDFs are — a 194-page document comes out 36% smaller • Never downloads without showing you what changed first • Full keyboard editing, and screen-reader labels on every line • 100% on-device: no upload, no account, no sign-in Made for anyone who has to fix a typo in a contract, a price in a quote, or a date on a form — and can't have it look edited. Honest about its limits, too. Some PDFs draw text in ways that can't be rewritten safely, and Kern says so plainly instead of quietly mangling the page. It will refuse an edit rather than swap in a font that doesn't match — then it names the characters it couldn't set and offers you a face that can, preferring one the file already has. It never swaps a typeface without asking. It tells you when a page is a scan rather than pretending to edit it — and offers to read the words off it, on your device, so you can search them. Free for 3 exports a day, resetting at midnight — and a whole many-files run counts as one of them, however many documents it changed. Kern Pro (one-time $20, no subscription): unlimited exports. Your PDFs never leave your device — the only time Kern contacts a server at all is the moment you activate a licence key. Same tool on the web: kern.mrrage.dev