Features

What Pagewright can do — and what it can’t yet

Everything below is in the app and covered by automated tests against real PDF output. Where a feature has limits, they are listed with it.

Editing

Edit the text already in your PDFs

Edit existing text. Change the words already in a PDF. Edit a whole paragraph — it rewraps at its original width, spacing and alignment — or replace a single line in place. Limits: Right-to-left and vertical text cannot be edited yet. Text drawn with Type 3 fonts, and text inside graphics repeated on the page, cannot be edited yet. A paragraph that mixes fonts or sizes takes the style of its first word. Text after the paragraph does not move: longer text may overlap what is below, and Pagewright warns you. If the original font lacks a character you type, the closest standard or bundled font is used and Pagewright tells you.
Add text and images. Place text boxes with your choice of font, size, colour and alignment, and add PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP or WebP images. Move, resize and delete them, with undo. Limits: Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indic characters in new text are not drawn yet (Pagewright names them before you save).
Thai text in added content. Text boxes, comments, stamps, headers and form fields accept Thai, drawn with a bundled Noto Sans Thai font so it prints and searches correctly.
Safe saving and recovery. Save as a new file or replace the original with a backup. Every save is read back by two independent PDF readers before it replaces anything, and unsaved edits are kept in a recovery journal if the app closes unexpectedly.

Page organization

Reorder, rotate, delete and insert pages. Drag thumbnails to reorder; rotate, delete, duplicate, insert blank pages or pages from another PDF; extract pages to a new file; crop, resize and relabel pages.
Merge and split. Combine PDFs in the order you choose, with page ranges per file, or split a document by ranges, every N pages or top-level bookmarks. Your originals are never changed. Limits: Encrypted files cannot be merged.
Page numbers, headers, footers, watermarks and Bates numbers. Add real text to every page — page numbers, headers and footers, watermarks and Bates numbers — with a preview before you save.

Annotations

Highlight, comment and mark up. Highlight, underline and strike out text; add notes, free text, drawings, lines, arrows, rectangles, ellipses and stamps. Reply to comments and mark them resolved. Limits: XFDF comment import and export is not available.

Forms and signatures

Fill PDF forms. Fill text fields, check boxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and lists. Reset a form, save and reuse values, and flatten the form when you save if you want to. Limits: Creating new form fields is not available. XFA forms cannot be filled (they open for viewing).
Visible signatures. Draw, type or import your signature or initials and place it on the page. Reuse it only if you choose to save it. Limits: A visible signature is a picture of your signature. It is not a certificate-based digital signature.
Check certificate signatures. See whether certificate-based digital signatures in a PDF are intact, who signed, whether Windows trusts the certificate, and whether the file changed after signing. Limits: Revocation is not checked (Pagewright works offline), so it always shows as unknown. Missing certificates are not downloaded.
Sign with a certificate (Windows certificate store). Sign a PDF with a certificate already installed in your Windows certificate store. The private key stays in Windows. An optional time stamp is off by default. Limits: Tested with software certificates created for testing; not yet tested with a smart card, USB token or a purchased certificate. Not tested against a public time-stamp server. Long-term validation data (PAdES B-LT/B-LTA) is not added.

OCR and conversion

Make scanned PDFs searchable (OCR). Recognize printed text in scanned pages on your computer. Pagewright adds an invisible text layer so you can search and copy, and lists words it is unsure of so you can check them. Limits: English is included. Other languages are added from a Tesseract language file. Accuracy depends on scan quality; handwriting, tables and badly degraded scans may not be recognized reliably. Turn sideways pages upright before running OCR.
Convert and export. Turn images into a PDF, export pages as PNG or JPEG at the resolution you choose, export text (UTF-8 and other encodings), and print several pages per sheet.
Compress. Choose a compression preset, compare the size and quality before and after, then save the smaller copy.

Batch productivity

Batch processing. Rotate, watermark, add page numbers or Bates numbers, clean metadata, flatten forms or compress many files at once. Results go to a folder you choose, with a report; your originals are untouched.
Bates numbering across a set of files. Number a whole set of PDFs continuously, preview the first and last number of each file, and save a CSV or JSON manifest. Interrupted runs resume with the same numbers. Limits: Removing Bates numbers stamped by other tools is not offered.
Automate recipes. Save a sequence of steps — such as OCR, metadata cleanup, page numbers and compression — as a recipe, try it with a dry run, and run it on many files.
Compare two PDFs. View two documents side by side with synchronized scrolling, and see text and visual differences.

We only list features once they ship and pass testing. Pagewright does not do these yet:

Secure redaction (permanently removing content). Covering shapes are never presented as redaction.
Password-protecting or encrypting PDFs. Encrypted PDFs open for viewing, searching and printing only.
Creating or editing form fields (filling existing forms works).
Editing right-to-left or vertical text in existing documents.
Replacing or moving images that are already in a PDF.
Filling XFA forms.
macOS and Linux versions.

For Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) only. Not available for Mac or Linux.