Pdf Surgeon

Model-driven editor of PDF text whose result keeps the original typesetting, by rewriting the page content stream in place — the string operand inside the existing BT/ET block is replaced and the Tm origin of everything after it on the line is retargeted, so font, size, colour, baseline, char/word spacing, horizontal scale and kerning survive untouched because they are never rewritten. This is the alternative to redact-and-re-stamp, which defaults to Helvetica 8pt and makes you restate font, size and colour by hand; get any of that wrong and the page reads as forged. The phrase must match exactly (whitespace is ignored); a fuzzy match is refused rather than allowed to edit text the caller never named. Until an edit is accepted the output is written under a temporary name next to the destination and moved into place only after verification passes, so a failed check leaves nothing behind; the destination must end in .pdf, must not already exist, must not resolve to the input, and must have an existing parent directory, because the path arrives from the model. Verification enforces that the edited line reads exactly as the original with the phrase swapped and nothing else, that every other line on the page is unchanged, that block count, baseline, font, size and spacing hold, that the old phrase's occurrence count dropped by exactly one (allowing for copies inside the replacement), and that the page's font/size/colour set is unchanged; a pixel-diff band is reported for information and does not decide the outcome. Refuses, writing nothing, on scans, Type3/XObject text, pages with more than one content stream, and a replacement needing a glyph the embedded subset lacks — it never falls back to substituting a typeface. Widths are measured from the embedded font program, not the system font of the same name. action="inspect" lists each line with its baseline and BT/ET block count so a caller can tell whether a document is editable before choosing what to replace. Requires a digital-born PDF whose text is laid out as one block per word/run with an explicit Tm origin (Word, LibreOffice, Excel, Google Docs).

Category

Memory & notes · Work & business

Maintained by

Samuek9 (Community)

Needs

No API keys declared

Adds tools

pdf_replace_text

Works on

linux, macos, windows

Version

1.0.1

In the catalog

2026-10-06