The Best Way to Mark Up PDFs Without Installing Anything

Someone sends you a PDF and you need to circle one paragraph.

The PDF Reader opens the file in a browser tab and gives you two markup tools. The file never leaves your device.

Two ways to mark up a page

Add Textbox drops a box on the page. Type in it and it grows to fit. You get five text sizes, bold, italic, underline, bullet and numbered lists, and a color picker. Leave a box empty and it removes itself.

Draw opens a second toolbar with a pen, rectangle, oval, line and arrow, plus a Select / Move pointer. There are nine colors and four stroke widths. Undo removes the last shape on the page you are looking at. Clear All empties that page only.

Drawing switches off when you open Text to Speech, the Notepad, Summarize, Download, Open PDF or Add Textbox.

What the download contains

The Download button opens a panel called Options with two choices. Original only hands back the file exactly as it arrived. With my changes paints your text boxes and shapes onto the pages and saves a second copy. Saving and downloading an annotated PDF covers both choices.

Three things to know about that copy:

• Highlights are not in it. Those come from the separate Highlight Menu, and making one needs Helperbird Pro.
• Your marks are painted onto the page rather than attached as PDF comments. Nobody can click one in Acrobat to edit it or reply to it.
• Text boxes are written in a Latin alphabet only. Any part of a box holding emoji, Greek, Cyrillic or Chinese characters is dropped with no warning. Text taller than its box is cut off at the bottom.

The file name comes from the PDF's own title, not the file you opened. A document with no title saves as Helperbird PDF_annotated.pdf.

Nothing is saved until you download

Your boxes and shapes live in the open tab. Close it, reload it, or open a second PDF, and they are gone. There is no autosave and no draft.

Download before you walk away.

Reading tools in the same window

You turn pages with the arrows or the numbered page buttons. Text to Speech reads the page you are on, and turning to the next page stops it.

The More options menu holds four tools: Immersive Reader, Translate, Summarize and Screenshot Reader. Summarize and Screenshot Reader need Helperbird Pro.

Immersive Reader and Translate use the text you selected, or the whole page if you selected nothing. In the browser extension, Helperbird Free stops both at 2,000 characters.

Summarize uses the passage you selected, or the whole page when nothing is selected.

What it does not do

• There is no zoom control and no box to type a page number into.
• One page shows at a time. There is no continuous scroll.
• No search inside the document, no thumbnails, no bookmarks panel, no page rotation, no merge, no split and no signature tool.
• You cannot change the PDF's own text.
• Password-protected files will not open.
• There is no share button.

Where to go next

Open a PDF in the reader and press Draw. The drawing tools guide covers every tool, and drawing on a PDF with your keyboard covers marking up without a mouse.

Helperbird is free to try.