Annotate PDF — Add Notes and Highlights to a PDF Free

Upload your PDF and use the toolbar to highlight text, underline passages, add sticky notes, draw freehand, insert text boxes, stamps and arrows. Everything renders directly in your browser — no Adobe Acrobat licence, no desktop install — and your annotated PDF stays a real PDF that opens cleanly in Preview, Acrobat Reader and Foxit.

Yes. Annotations are saved using the standard PDF annotation layer, so reviewers, lawyers and clients see the exact same highlights and comments in Acrobat Reader, macOS Preview and every modern browser. They are not flattened images either — recipients can hide them, reply to them or remove them with their own PDF tool.

Yes. Drop a signature image, type a stylised signature or use the draw tool to ink your name with a mouse or touch device. Add Approved, Confidential and Draft stamps for fast contract markup, and place initials in the margins where your counterparty expects them.

Toggle the "Flatten on download" option before saving and every highlight, comment and signature is baked into the page bitmap. Flattened PDFs are useful for final delivery — recipients can read them but cannot accidentally move or delete your notes.

Partly. Placing and editing annotations happens live in your browser, but exporting sends your PDF to our secure server over HTTPS to bake the annotations into the file — it is removed under our Security policy — unless you explicitly share a result, which keeps it at a public link anyone who has it can open for up to 30 days — and we never share or sell it. If your workflow requires the file to never leave your device, use a desktop PDF editor instead.

Yes. Navigate every page in the side panel, annotate scanned reports, and add searchable text boxes on top of image-only PDFs. Scanned PDFs keep their original layout while your annotations sit on a transparent overlay so the underlying scan stays sharp.

Pick the Text tool, type your note and choose a color and size, then click the exact spot on the page to drop it (or tap 'Add to page'). Drag it to reposition, or tap it to edit later. The note is written into the PDF as real, selectable text, so it stays crisp and searchable in the download.

Yes. Switch to the Highlight tool, pick a highlighter color (yellow, green, blue, pink and more presets, or any custom color), then drag a translucent band across the text. Add as many highlights as you like and resize each one — handy for flagging clauses in a contract or key passages in a paper.

This tool layers your own text and highlights on top of the page; it doesn't rewrite the document's existing words. To edit the original content, use the PDF Editor tool, which lets you modify the text and elements already in the file.

The Stamp tool includes seven ready-made presets — APPROVED, CONFIDENTIAL, DRAFT, REVIEWED, PAID, URGENT and VOID — or you can type your own custom stamp text in the field below the presets. Pick any color for the stamp, click a spot on the page to place it, and it renders as a bold, bordered label baked into the exported PDF.

Select the annotation, then drag its corner handle to resize it — text and stamps scale their font size, while highlights stretch their width and height. On a touchscreen you can also pinch with two fingers directly on the annotation to scale it up or down.

Highlight the clauses that need attention using a bright preset color, add Text notes with your comments next to each one, then drop an APPROVED or REVIEWED stamp near the signature line before exporting. Combining all three tools on the same page gives reviewers a clear, at-a-glance markup.

Yes — the Pages panel shows an Annotations list with every text note, highlight and stamp you've placed, labelled by type and page number. Tap any entry to jump straight to that page with the annotation selected, which is handy once a long document has dozens of highlights and comments scattered across many pages.

Yes — select any text note, highlight or stamp on the page, then press Delete or Backspace to remove it instantly instead of reaching for the trash-can icon. This only works when an annotation is selected and you're not typing in a text field, so it won't accidentally delete something while you're editing a note.

A placed stamp's text can't be edited directly — the Edit selected panel only lets you change its color once it's on the page. To fix the wording, delete the stamp with the trash icon or Delete key, then pick the correct preset or type new custom text in the Stamp panel before adding it to the page again.

Click anywhere on the page to place a text note, pick its color and size, and repeat on any page — you can mix notes with highlights and stamps in the same pass. When you download, the annotations are flattened into the file so your comments stay visible in every PDF viewer your reviewers use. No Acrobat or signup is needed.

Yes — Pixoate supports batch and bulk processing. Switch to Batch mode, add up to 60 PDFs on Premium or 200 on Pro, set your options once, and every PDF is processed with the same settings before you download a single ZIP. Bulk processing is a Premium feature; the output uses the same quality and settings as single mode.

Yes — with bulk processing you configure the settings a single time and they apply to every item in the batch — up to 60 PDFs on Premium or 200 on Pro. There is no need to repeat the setup per item, and Temporary uploaded and generated files are processed securely and deleted automatically.

Almost always one of three things. The file is over the 20 MB free upload limit — Premium takes 50 MB and Pro 120 MB. The format is not one this tool accepts, so check the list shown on the upload panel. Or the file is not really the format its name says: renaming a file does not change what is inside it, and that is the reason a valid-looking PDF gets refused.

Page content is preserved, but anything that depended on the original file being interactive can behave differently — form fields, layers and annotations may be flattened into the page depending on the operation you ran. If you need the fields to stay fillable, do the flattening step last. Keep the untouched original until you have checked the output end to end.

Annotate PDF supports free standard use within the published processing allowances. Free downloads are clean — no watermark. No signup is required for standard tool use. Photo effects and AI edits have a web-size limit on Free, with the original-resolution result available through Premium or one credit. Crop, resize, rotate, compress and convert stay full size. Premium supports batches of up to 60 files, with the applicable plan limits shown before processing.

No — Annotate PDF runs in the browser on desktop and phone. There is nothing to install, no trial to start, and no license to buy before you can see whether it does what you need. Try it on the file you are actually stuck with rather than a sample.