How to add text to a PDF
Last updated: 2026-07-28
A contract draft needs "DRAFT" on it before it circulates. An invoice needs a name and a date in the box at the bottom. In both cases the original Word file is somewhere else, and buying a PDF editor for a five-second job is absurd. Opening the PDF in a browser and placing the text where it belongs takes about a minute.
The basic flow
Press the Text button on the page you want to write on. A dialog opens with a text box, a size slider, three colours and a bold checkbox. On confirm, the text lands centred 60px down from the top of that page. That is only a starting position: click to select, drag it where it belongs, and resize with the corner handle. The aspect ratio is locked, so letters never stretch. Select and press Delete to remove it.
One behaviour worth knowing — a line wider than the page is scaled down to fit 90% of the page width, so a very long single line comes out smaller than you asked for. Break long content across lines instead.
Size 20 is not body size
The slider runs 10 to 72 and starts at 20, which is larger than most people expect. Body text in a typical business document sits at 10–11pt and subheadings around 14pt, so the default is roughly double body size — closer to a heading. Perfect for a stamp-like "APPROVED"; far too loud for a name beside a signature line.
As a rule of thumb: 11–13 to blend into the document's own prose, 12–16 for names and dates filled into boxes, 24–36 for a mark meant to be seen at a glance.
Do not judge size by how big it looks on your monitor — the whole page is scaled there. Compare it against the document's own text on the same screen; both shrink by the same factor, so a match on screen is a match on paper. Resizing after placement is fine, with one caveat: the text is rendered at 3× resolution, so shrinking sharpens it while enlarging it well past its original size softens the edges. If you want it big, set the slider big.
Use line breaks to keep a block together
The box keeps your line breaks and centres the lines relative to each other, so a name on one line with a date underneath becomes a single object that moves as one piece. Entered as two separate items, you would be aligning them by eye and knocking them out of true every time you nudge one.
What the three colours signal
- Near-black reads as part of the document, as if it had always been there. Right for filling a blank that was meant to be filled.
- Navy blue marks your addition without looking informal, carrying the old convention that blue ink means a hand-completed original rather than a photocopy.
- Red reads unmistakably as an annotation laid on top: change requests, rejection reasons, a draft watermark.
If the document will be printed in black and white, avoid red — it renders as a mid grey and looks faded rather than urgent. For print emphasis, near-black with bold on is far more reliable.
The text goes in as an image — the honest trade-off
StickPDF draws your text onto a canvas and embeds it as a transparent image rather than as real PDF text. The advantage is that what you see is exactly what you get: no font embedding step, so no chance of a missing glyph turning into tofu boxes on someone else's machine. Accented characters, currency symbols, non-Latin scripts and emoji all survive intact, and 3× rendering keeps everything crisp in print.
The limitation is that the words are not selectable and not searchable in the exported PDF. Nobody can copy them, Ctrl+F will not find them, and a screen reader cannot read them aloud. So this is the right tool for stamps, names, dates and short confirmations — and the wrong tool if the recipient needs to copy the wording, if the file must be full-text searchable in a records system, or if accessibility requirements apply. In those cases, edit the source file and re-export. For the same reason, this cannot fix a typo in text already in the PDF; it only lays new content on top.
Repeating a mark across pages
If every page needs the same stamp, do not retype it — matching size and colour by hand is fiddly and small inconsistencies look sloppy. Select the one you got right, press Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V, and the copy keeps its size, colour and weight. Copies appear slightly offset so they never hide underneath the original.
Worth being clear about
If you need a handwritten mark rather than a typed name, see signing a PDF on your phone. And a typed name or an "APPROVED" stamp is a visual mark, not a certificate-based electronic signature. Whether it carries weight depends on the type of document, what the parties have agreed and the law where you are, so check what the recipient requires before relying on it. This is general information, not legal advice. Everything here runs in your browser — the PDF is never uploaded.