Forum Discussion
Is there any easy way to add text to pdf on PC?
JavaScript with pdf-lib can add text to a PDF without Acrobat. It's a free, open-source library that runs in Node.js or the browser, letting you load an existing PDF and draw text directly onto its pages .
Here's the straightforward way to handle how to add text to PDF without Acrobat using pdf-lib. You load the PDF, grab a page, and call drawText() with your content and coordinates .
import { PDFDocument, StandardFonts, rgb } from 'pdf-lib';
const existingPdfBytes = ...; // your PDF file bytes
const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(existingPdfBytes);
const font = await pdfDoc.embedFont(StandardFonts.Helvetica);
const page = pdfDoc.getPages()[0];page.drawText('Your new text here', {
x: 50,
y: 500,
size: 18,
font: font,
color: rgb(0, 0, 0),
});const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save();
A couple of practical notes: pdf-lib's default fonts don't support non-Latin characters like Chinese or Japanese, so you'd need to embed a custom font (via pdf-lib/fontkit) for those.
Also, it's a library, not a finished app—you'll need to write a short script or run it in a browser environment to actually perform how to add text to PDF without Acrobat on your files . If you're comfortable with a little code, it's a clean, dependency-free solution.