How to annotate a PDF online

The PDFs people mark up are often the sensitive ones: a contract to comment on, a lease to flag, a report to review before a meeting. Many free "annotate PDF" sites upload your file to their servers to do the work, which puts a private document on a company you may know nothing about.

The EditItAll PDF annotator works the opposite way. Your file is opened and marked up entirely on your device — nothing is transmitted. You get seven annotation types: highlight, underline, free text, sticky notes, shapes and freehand ink. For anything confidential, keeping it local is the difference that matters.

Marking up a document takes a minute:

• Open the PDF editor and load your file.
• Pick a tool — highlight or underline to draw attention to text, free text to type a comment on the page, a sticky note for a longer remark, shapes to box or circle a region, or ink to write freehand.
• Place your annotations where you want them; adjust colour and position as you go.
• Export. You get a standard PDF, downloaded straight to your device, with your markup baked in.

The editor works offline once it has loaded, so you can disconnect and still finish — a simple proof that your file isn't going anywhere.

It's worth being clear about what annotating does. Annotations sit on top of the page: they comment on, highlight and mark up the document without changing the words that are already there. That's exactly what you want for reviewing, flagging and signing off.

What annotation does not do is rewrite the PDF's existing text stream — for that you'd need the original source file. If your goal is to place new words on the page rather than comment on it, use the add-text tool, and to approve a document, add a signature. All of it happens in the same editor, in the same private, offline pass.