Sometimes, annotating a PDF just doesn’t cut it—you need to actually change the content itself. That’s where a proper PDF editor like UPDF steps in.
Text Editing
UPDF gives you all the tools you need to edit text directly in your PDFs. You can easily remove or add content, with a wide variety of fonts to choose from—including custom fonts you install on your Mac. If the app doesn’t have the font you want, just add it to your system, and it’s ready to use. You can also change font colour and styling, though adjusting text may sometimes require you to move nearby elements.
All the basics are here: bold, italic, underline, and strikeout. You can align, justify, and space out your text by line, paragraph, or even character. Super and subscript are also supported, along with indentation tools. Just note that underline and strikeout options aren’t quite as front and centre as bold and italic.
Find & Replace
Find and replace in a PDF? Yes, really—and it works beautifully in UPDF. You can choose which instances to replace and which to leave as they are. It’s a feature we’re used to seeing in word processors, and having it here is incredibly useful.
We’ve also associated headers and footers with word processing software, but UPDF 2.0 brings them to PDFs with ease. You can even use images, and text headers are surprisingly customisable—fun to set up, even!
Images
UPDF lets you resize, stretch, crop, and replace images in your PDF using photos from anywhere on your Mac. One standout feature? You can extract images from the PDF and save them separately—a tool I really wish I had years ago.
Objects
Once you’ve made your edits, chances are you’ll want to move things around. With UPDF, shifting paragraphs and images is smooth and responsive. If you’re coming from heavier apps like Foxit or Acrobat, you’ll appreciate just how snappy this feels.
You can adjust how text flows within its boxes, but resizing them still depends on font size. Paragraphs can’t be rotated—only images can be, and only at 90° angles, which feels a bit restrictive. Flipping is possible, though, which might help depending on your style.
Hyperlinks
No modern PDF editor is complete without hyperlinking. UPDF supports both visible and invisible links. I used to prefer the invisible ones—until I struggled to find them later!
However, linking to specific pages can be a bit of a pain. You have to scroll manually through the document to find your page. Not bad for short files, but tedious for longer ones. Once you do find your page, you can pin the link precisely where you want it. Navigation back to previous pages is also supported, and linking to web pages is quick and simple.
Document Protection
UPDF offers strong document protection with watermarks, redaction, and passwords.
- Watermarks can be text, images—even other PDFs. You control the size, position, rotation, and opacity. Unlike images, watermarks can rotate freely, which is how image rotation should work, honestly.
- Redaction is thorough—it doesn’t just hide text; it permanently removes it. UPDF lets you redact both text and images, with options to label redactions according to various legal standards. Labels can also be colour-coded and aligned.
- If you’re thinking of deleting a whole page instead—don’t. Deleted content can sometimes be recovered, but redacted content cannot. You can even redact specific words across an entire document or sanitise it to remove hidden metadata. That’s a brilliant feature I didn’t know I needed until now.
Compare PDFs
Even without documents on hand to test it fully, I can tell that UPDF’s comparison tool is excellent. It highlights differences across versions—text, images, and even page changes—and explains each one. You can filter what you want to see, and scrolling between the two documents is synced. It’s incredibly helpful for anyone managing document revisions.
Merge
Merging PDFs in UPDF is more powerful than usual. Not only can you combine files and reorder them—you can also standardise page sizes in the final document, which is a rare and welcome feature.
Split
Splitting is easy and intuitive, though I was slightly disappointed to see how closely it resembles cropping. It would be great if these were treated as separate tools that could work together. As for cropping, I wish we could add space around the page not just cutting it.
Compress
Compression is fast and informative. UPDF shows the expected sizes at each compression level, helping you choose wisely. You can also flatten your PDF and apply password protection at the same time. There are three encryption levels to pick from.
Convert
UPDF converts PDFs to and from almost every common file type: Office documents, images, text files, HTML, and rich text formats. It even supports Bates numbering for legal or archival work.
Page Editing
Page management is flexible. You can:
- Insert new pages from your device or as blank pages
- Replace existing ones directly (no more delete-then-add workaround)
- Split PDFs by page count, file size, or by bookmarks
- Rotate, reorder, or resize pages
Resizing doesn’t add space around a page—just scales the content. A small limitation, but worth knowing.
Final Thoughts
If your computer struggles with heavyweights like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Foxit PDF Editor, UPDF is a refreshing alternative. It’s lightweight on your CPU, easy on your RAM, and gentler on your wallet too. We highly recommend it—especially if you want a powerful PDF editor that’s fast, modern, and fun to use.
