jPDF - edit the document, not a picture of it.

Most Mac PDF tools let you draw on top of a document. jPDF goes into it. Select a sentence and retype it and the words are replaced inside the page, set in the document's own embedded font. Redact a paragraph and the content is genuinely gone, not hidden behind a rectangle. Sign a contract and it carries a cryptographic signature, a trusted timestamp, and - if you need it - the evidence to stay verifiable years after the certificate expires.

Built on Apple's own frameworks plus the Apache-licensed PDFio. No third-party trackers, no cloud dependency, no account to create.

✍️ Edit the words that are already there

The thing most PDF editors can't honestly do. Select text in the original document, choose Edit Selected Text, and jPDF rewrites that run in the page's content stream - reusing the document's embedded font, so the replacement sits in the line looking like it always belonged.

How it works: jPDF measures the original run's baseline, colour and weight from the rendered ink rather than trusting font metrics, re-encodes your replacement through the font's own character map, and writes it back width-neutral so the rest of the line doesn't reflow. Where a run can't be isolated cleanly - an unusual font, or a selection cutting through a ligature - it falls back to covering the original and drawing the new text, and the status line tells you which happened. It never silently pretends.

And for text you add yourself

• Type anywhere - click and start typing; the box wraps at the page margin and grows downward like a word processor rather than scrolling sideways
• Real typography - font family and size, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, applied as you type or changed mid-edit
• Alignment and margins - left, centre or right within the box; a vertical anchor that decides which edge lands where you click; and a wrap margin you set
• Rulers and placement guides - inch rulers along the page edges, with dashed crosshairs that follow the pointer so you can see exactly where the text will land before you click
• Snap to a grid - a non-printing layout grid with adjustable spacing that can fit itself to the document's own text rhythm

🖍️ Annotate, mark up, and draw

Everything you'd expect, on a ribbon that groups the tools by the job rather than burying them in menus.

• Text markup - highlight, underline and strike through the document's own words
• Freehand - an ink pen for drawing and a marker that lets the text show through
• Shapes and links - rectangles, ovals and lines with adjustable width and colour, plus clickable web links drawn over any region
• Sticky notes - pop-up comments anchored to the page
• Erase - cover a region with the page background. Where the selection covers whole words cleanly, jPDF deletes that text from the document instead of hiding it - and says so
• Export your comments - as standard XFDF for another PDF tool, or as a readable Markdown summary for circulating review notes

📄 Pages, layout, and navigation

📤 Get the content out

Turn a PDF into something you can work with - and let scanned pages come along too.

How it works: pages that carry real text are read directly. Image-only pages are recognised on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework - there's no button to press and nothing to switch on, and the status line notes when OCR was involved.

• Export As - Text, Markdown, HTML, or Word. Structure is preserved where jPDF can see it: headings, lists, and bold or italic runs become real tags rather than flat text
• Tables to CSV or Excel - jPDF detects the table on the page and opens a preview where each column is colour-coded. Click to add a divider, drag to move one, double-click to merge - then export once it's right
• Pages as images - PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 72, 150, 300 or 600 dpi, with a quality control for the lossy formats
• A searchable copy - run OCR over a scan and jPDF writes a new file with an invisible recognised-text layer sitting exactly on the words, so it selects, searches and copies like any other document. Your original is never modified
• Spreadsheets in, PDFs out - open an .xlsx directly as a wide, all-columns PDF, or build a new PDF from a folder of images
• Compress - write a smaller optimised copy, reporting exactly how much it saved
• Barcodes and QR codes - scan every page and list what it finds, payload included

🧾 Fillable forms

Author a real AcroForm that works in Preview, Acrobat, Chrome and anywhere else - or make an existing paper-style form fillable in a couple of clicks.

• Four field types - text boxes, checkboxes, dropdowns with your own option list, and radio groups that link automatically as you draw them
• Properties that matter - name, default value, required and read-only flags, text size, and border and fill colours
• Fields that share one answer - copy a field to every page, or link two existing fields by name, and whatever the reader types in one appears in all of them
• Laid out properly - snap to a grid that can match the document's own line spacing, with live alignment guides while you drag, multi-select for moving a group, and arrow-key nudging for the last point or two
• See and rename the plumbing - switch on field names to see each field's identifier on the page, and rename it in place. Meaningful names make the exported spreadsheet readable
• Data in and out - export completed answers as XFDF or CSV, and fill a blank form from a saved XFDF in one undoable step

🧠 On-device intelligence

Apple Intelligence and Apple's Vision framework, running on the Neural Engine in your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, there's no account, and no internet connection is required.

Forms, drafted for you

Scan Form looks for blanks and drawn lines and proposes a field for each. AI Fields goes further and reads the document's wording - "Choose one of the following" over a list becomes a radio group; "Select your state" becomes a dropdown populated with the actual states. AI Form starts from nothing but a description: say what the form needs and Apple Intelligence drafts the fields and captions, which you can refine conversationally, regenerate, or save as a template. Nothing is placed until you accept it.

🔒 Redaction and privacy

Redaction in jPDF removes content. It does not draw a black rectangle over it and hope.

How it works: jPDF rebuilds the page with the region genuinely painted out, then verifies that nothing survived before accepting the change. If that check ever fails, your file is left untouched. Because the page is rebuilt as a flat image, text on that page is no longer selectable afterwards - which is the honest cost of the guarantee.

• Find PII - scan the document for social security numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses and phone numbers, review the masked list, and redact the lot in one step. It's a pattern match, so read the list before you confirm
• Password-protected copies - save an encrypted copy that needs a password to open, leaving your working document untouched
• Certified documents open locked - a file carrying a certification signature opens view-only, so an accidental edit can't silently invalidate its seal

✒️ Signing and certifying

A complete, layered signing suite. Use one layer or all of them on the same file - each is added as its own append-only revision, so earlier signatures are never disturbed.

• Sign & Certify in one step - a guided flow that picks the signer, places the visible block, and produces a document that is signed, certified, locked and visibly marked, with a trusted timestamp when you're online
• Make your own certificate - generate a self-signed signing certificate in the app if you don't have one, or use a .p12 from a real certificate authority
• Verify what you're given - a signatures panel lists every signature on a document and whether each is still valid, and the barcode reader decodes a jPDF QR seal back into its signer, timestamp and hash
• An editable copy when you need one - a certified document is locked, but you can always save an unsealed copy to work from; the original stays intact and the copy is honestly no longer certified

When jPDF uses the network. Everything above happens on your Mac. There are three deliberate exceptions, and you start every one of them yourself. Adding a trusted Timestamp or Add LTV contacts a public authority, sending a hash of the signature or a certificate-status query - never your document, and never its contents. And if you choose to send a bug report, it goes to us over an encrypted connection: it describes what the app did - which save path ran, how many pages, your Mac model and macOS version, and any error - but never your document's text, page images or form values, never where the file lives, and its name only if you tick the box. jPDF shows you the finished report before anything is sent, so you can read it, copy it instead, or cancel. Use none of those three and jPDF never opens a connection at all.

💾 Saving that respects the original

A PDF is not a bag of pixels, and rewriting one carelessly loses things you can't see - form logic, accessibility tags, embedded attachments. jPDF works hard not to.

Every one of those paths re-opens its own output and checks it before accepting it, falling back to a safer route on any anomaly. And where a document uses something a rewrite genuinely can't reproduce - XFA forms, or the Type 3 text a browser's "Print to PDF" produces - jPDF tells you once, up front, rather than letting you discover it later.

🧰 Built for the Mac

• A real ribbon - four tabs (Home, Comment, Forms, Protect & Sign) over a band of controls that never moves, so Undo, Find and zoom are always where you left them
• Undo everything - every edit, including redaction and erase, is undoable right up until you save
• Right-click anywhere - delete an object, edit selected text, open field properties, copy a field
• Standard shortcuts - ⌘O, ⌘S, ⌘F, ⌘P and the rest behave exactly as you'd expect, plus arrow-key nudging and ⇧-click multi-select on the canvas
• A full user guide built in - Help ▸ jPDF Help (⌘?) opens the complete guide, including the signing chapter, without going near a browser

jPDF treats a PDF as a document to be edited rather than an image to be decorated - and keeps the whole job, from redaction to certification, on the Mac in front of you.

While you're here, take a look at jFile NLP, the natural-language file manager for macOS.

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