If the PDF is all you have left of your resume (CV), you can still change a line of it: a date range, a job title, a phone number, a misspelled word. Open the PDF in PDF Textfix, double-click the line, type the new text and press Return, then save. The line keeps its font and its place (a character the font lacks is marked in orange), and everything you do not edit is copied as it was, unless the file was damaged; PDF Textfix tells you when it repaired one. What you cannot do this way is add a job, a bullet or a section, because that needs new lines. For those, rebuild the resume from its source, or start a new one; this page ends with when to choose that.
How do you edit a resume PDF without the original file?
One line at a time. A line edit changes the text of one line on the page. On the demo CV made for PDF Textfix, these are all single lines:
- the job title under the name, “Senior Product Designer”;
- the contact line,
theodora.lind@mail.example · +44 20 7946 0958 · Hartwell, where the email, the phone number and the town share one line; - each date range, such as “2022 – present, Hartwell”, which sits on the same baseline as the role but is a line of its own;
- each line of a bullet. The first bullet under Fieldnote wraps, so it is two lines, and the second holds only the word “third.”
That last point matters. An edit changes one line and never moves text to the next, so a bullet that grows by three words does not wrap; the line gets longer. When it would run into the words after it on the same line, PDF Textfix moves them along, and when moving cannot make room, it refuses the edit and says why. So reword a bullet within its old length.
What is not a line edit: a new job, a new bullet, a reordered section, a second page. PDF Textfix changes text that is already in the PDF and adds none.
Will the new text match your resume’s font?
On the demo CV, yes: its fonts carry every English letter, digit and punctuation mark. It is set in two weights of IBM Plex Sans, embedded as subsets:
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
AAAAAB+IBMPlexSans-SmBld TrueType MacRoman yes yes no 9 0
AAAAAC+IBMPlexSans TrueType MacRoman yes yes no 10 0Each line keeps its own weight. Edit a role such as “Product Designer, Kettle & Co.” and the new words come out in SemiBold, as the role did; edit a bullet and they come out in Regular. You cannot make one word bold, because that would change the font of part of a line.
A resume whose fonts were subset to the characters it used may lack a letter you type. PDF Textfix then looks for it in another copy of the same font in the file, where the character is underlined, then in the same font installed on your Mac, and only then in the closest standard font. A character from either of the last two is marked in orange, so you see it before you save:
You type é. The line’s own font has no é.
- Another copy of the same font in the file.
- The same font, installed on your Mac.
- The closest standard font.
What happens when you edit a resume PDF in Canva or Word?
Both turn your PDF into a document of their own, which you then edit and export as a new PDF. That is a good start for a rebuild and a risky way to change one line. Canva’s help is direct about it: “Unsupported fonts may be replaced with similar fonts.” and “Some layouts may shift slightly after import and may need minor adjustments.” Microsoft says opening a PDF in Word “works best with PDFs that are mostly text” and warns that “The converted document might not have a perfect page-to-page correspondence with the original. For example, lines and pages may break at different locations.” A resume is mostly text, but it is also columns, dates aligned to a right margin and two weights of one font, which is where conversions slip.
Editing a PDF in Canva versus editing the PDF and How to edit a PDF in Word or Pages go through each route in detail.
Will an applicant tracking system still read your resume?
Recruiting software reads the text of your file, not its look. Greenhouse describes parsing like this: “When you parse a resume, Greenhouse Recruiting scans an imported resume and auto-fills appropriate fields with information it detects when adding a new candidate or prospect to your account.” Its list of resumes it cannot parse includes “Resumes that are uploaded as an image, rather than a document (such as a .docx or .pdf)” and “A resume with spaces between the letters.”
So the way you fix a line matters. A white box drawn over the old words, with new words typed on top, leaves both in the file, and a parser may read the old ones. PDF Textfix replaces the text of the line, and Save removes the replaced line from the page. Before it applies an edit it checks that the line reads back as typed, and refuses the edit if it would not: “After this edit the line would not read as typed, so it was not applied.” To check the saved resume yourself, copy the edited line out of it and paste it into a note.
How do you check your resume before you send it?
Before you send it, four checks:
- Keep the old version. File > Save As… (⇧⌘S) writes the updated resume under a new name and leaves the original as it was, which helps when an application asks for the version you sent last year.
- Review every change. Turn on the Edited filter in the Lines pane (⌥⌘L). It lists only the lines you changed, so a half-typed date cannot hide.
- Read the edited lines at a large zoom (⌘+), where an orange fallback character or a line that now runs close to the margin is easy to see.
- Look outside the page. The document’s properties are not part of the page, and Save leaves them as they were. The demo CV’s title property reads “Theodora Lind, CV” and its author “Theodora Lind”; a resume made for one job can carry that job’s name there. The file name travels with the resume too.
When should you rebuild your resume instead?
When more than a few lines change. A new role, a reordered history, a new section or a different design is a new resume, and editing a PDF line by line is the slow way to make one. Rebuild it in a word processor or a resume template, keep the source file this time, and export a fresh PDF. PDF Textfix is for the small, exact fixes: the typo you spot after sending, the new phone number, the end date of a job you just left.
Questions about editing a resume PDF
Can I change the font of my resume while I edit it?
No. Each line keeps the font, size and color it has. Can PDF Textfix change the font, size or color? explains why and what to use instead.
Can I add a new job to my resume PDF?
No, that needs new lines, and PDF Textfix adds no text. Rebuild the resume, or see Can PDF Textfix add new text to a PDF?.
Can I update the phone number or email address on my resume?
Yes, both are text on a line. How to change numbers, a phone or an address in a PDF covers longer numbers and email links.
How many line edits does a resume update use?
One for each line you change. A new phone number and the end date of a job you just left are two line edits. Free to try. Your first 5 line edits save clean. After that, saved files carry a watermark until you buy once.
For a single wrong word, How to fix a typo in a PDF is the short version. Other documents are on the use cases page.
