PDF files are increasingly common these days and many times applications or forms are in the PDF format. If you are lucky these forms will allow you to edit and type into each of the fields so you can simply edit as needed, but many times the forms are made to be printed only so the only way to edit them would be to use a program such as Microsoft Office (anything higher than the 2003 edition) or a commercial PDF editor (they range from $20- $200). Of course, you can choose to print them and either use a typewriter or fill them in with a good old fashioned pen but that is so 1980's!

I recently spent a great deal of time trying to find a free way to edit and add text to PDF files. Unfortunately there are no freeware programs that will do this in one step (at least none that I could find) but I found a combination of 2 free programs that are very easy to use and get the job done.

In order to be able to edit and ad text to the pdf files you will need 2 free programs. The first is a program to convert the PDF to a TIFF file which is an image file. There are several free programs that do this, one that I have found that works well is PDFill free tools which can be found here: http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html

Make sure you get the free tools, though this company does offer a commercial editor for about $20. This product is probably one of the cheapest and easiest to use so I do recommend it if you need to edit PDF files on a regular basis but if you just need to fill out an application or only occasionally need to fill out PDF forms then read further I can show you how to do it for free.

Once you have the free PDFill tools the next program you will need is an Irfanview which is an image editor. This will let you add text to the PDF file that you have converted to an image. This program can be found here:

http://www.download.com/IrfanView/3000-2192_4-10021962.html?tag=lst-1

Once you have installed both of these programs follow the instruction below to edit and text to your PDF file.

1) The first thing you need to do is to convert your PDF to a tiff file. Start the PDFill tools and select the option to "convert the PDF to Images". The program will ask you to select the PDF file.

2) Once you have selected the PDF you wish to edit, the program will ask you about which pages you want and the image resolution. Make sure that the resolution is high enough so that the image looks clean (generally I select the highest resolution).

3) Select the image type (I use Tiff because it distorts the image less than some of the other formats) and click "save image as."

4) Once this is done the image will be saved with the same filename in the same folder as the PDF file except it will have the extension .tiff

5) Now open Irfanview and open the image

6) Once the image is open, select the area where you want to add text. You can do this by using your mouse to go the area and drawing a box (pushing the right mouse button while making a box) around the area you want to put the text in.

7) Go to the menu bar on top and select edit. Under edit there should be an option to "insert text to selection".

8) A new window should appear where you can add the text you want to put into the box. Make sure you uncheck the box that says "text is transparent" and also make sure that the background color is the same as the background on the image (generally white). Also you may need to increase the font size of the text to make it visible and fit into the area you selected (generally between 28-36).

9) Make sure you save your changes from time to time because it is very easy to accidently clear your changes with Irfanview.

Hope this helps you out. If you know of any other ways to add text please feel free to add it in the comments section below.