How to edit a PDF on Windows and macOS without Acrobat

Desktop PDF editing has a reputation for being expensive, largely because one product dominated it for two decades. In practice both platforms ship useful PDF features for free, and the remaining gaps do not justify a subscription.

What macOS gives you

Preview is a capable PDF editor that most Mac owners never fully explore. Its sidebar reorders and deletes pages by dragging, it merges files by dragging one thumbnail set into another, it rotates, and Markup signs and annotates. Any application can print to PDF from the print dialog.

What Windows gives you

Windows has Microsoft Print to PDF everywhere, and Edge opens PDFs, fills forms, annotates and can save the result. What it lacks is page management: no merge, no split, no reorder, no compress. That is the honest gap on Windows, and it is the reason so many people go looking for an installer.

The gaps on both platforms

• Compressing to a specific size — neither platform exposes a real control for this.
• Splitting into several documents at once, by page range.
• OCR to make a scan searchable.
• Removing metadata, or checking what a file is disclosing about itself.
• Adding page numbers, headers, footers, or watermarks across a document.

Why a browser tab rather than an installer

A desktop is fast enough that running the work locally in a tab costs nothing noticeable, and it avoids the two real risks of free PDF software: bundled extras in the installer, and uploading a confidential document to somebody else’s server. Nothing here is installed and nothing is uploaded.

On a desktop the machine is rarely the limit. Large scans, OCR and multi-hundred-page merges all run comfortably — unlike on a phone.

A sensible division of labour

Use the built-in tools for what they do well — Preview for quick page shuffling on a Mac, Edge for filling a form on Windows, print-to-PDF on both. Come here for the operations neither platform covers, and keep the original file until you have checked the result.