CBCOM Document Studio
One workspace for everything you do with documents. Open a PDF and really work on it — retype the text that is already there, white things out, highlight and annotate, sign it, add, remove, rotate or reorder pages. Or open a Word, Excel, CSV, Markdown or plain text file, edit it here and turn it into a PDF or a true PDF/A archive file. Every one of our PDF tools is one click away in the tools column, and it opens with your document already loaded. Everything happens on your own device — nothing is uploaded.
What you can do here
Open a PDF and it appears exactly as it will print. Edit text lets you click a line that is already in the document: we read its position, size and colour, cover it in the exact background colour of the paper around it, and put your new words back in the same spot as real, selectable PDF text. White out makes anything disappear, Markup gives you a highlighter, a pen, shapes, arrows and sticky notes, and Insert drops in an image, a signature you draw yourself, page numbers, a date or a watermark across every page. The Pages panel adds, deletes, duplicates, turns and reorders pages, or pulls one out as its own file. On the document side you can open a Word, Excel, CSV, text or Markdown file, edit it here and turn it into a PDF or a true PDF/A — or start from a blank page and write it from scratch.
Can I really edit the text in a PDF, like in Word?
Up to a point, and we would rather be honest about it. A PDF is not a Word file: it stores where each piece of text sits on the page, not paragraphs that reflow. So when you click a line, we read its exact position, size and colour, cover it in the measured background colour and put your new text back in the same place — as real, selectable PDF text. That is how nearly every PDF editor does it. Nothing reflows, and a very long replacement can run past where the old line ended. One thing worth knowing: covering text hides it, it does not delete it — the original words stay in the file and can be copied straight back out, which is true of every editor that works this way. Tick <em>Really remove what is underneath</em> and we turn that page into an image as you save, so the old words are genuinely gone. A document you started here, or one you opened from Word or Markdown, is a different story: there we still have the real document, so editing is genuine editing.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. Opening, editing, converting and saving all happen inside your own browser, which is also why the studio keeps working with no internet at all. The single exception is adding a PIN: PDF encryption is a standard a browser cannot write, so that one operation goes to our server, gets its PIN and comes straight back. Nothing is stored, there and back is all it does.
What does redacting do that a black rectangle does not?
A black box drawn on top of a name hides it on screen while the name is still sitting in the file, ready to be copied out — that mistake has ended up in the news more than once. When you redact, we turn that page into an image as you save it, so the words underneath are genuinely gone. The trade-off is that the redacted page is no longer selectable text; every other page keeps its text.
What is PDF/A, and why would I want it?
PDF/A is the archive flavour of PDF, laid down in ISO 19005. Everything it needs in order to look the same in fifty years — the fonts above all — is packed inside the file, and anything that could go stale is left out. Public bodies, courts and accountants often insist on it. We build it here on your own device: the fonts go in, the colour profile and the metadata are written the way the standard asks. Word and Excel documents keep their layout faithfully, though not pixel for pixel identical to Word itself.
Which documents can I open?
PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, plain text, Markdown, HTML and images. Older .doc and .xls files, plus OpenDocument and PowerPoint, can be converted on the website with our Word to PDF and Excel to PDF tools and then opened here. You can also start from nothing: a blank document, a blank spreadsheet or an empty PDF page.
Can I reuse the same document every time?
Yes. Build it once — a yearly closing notice, an invoice for customers at home, abroad or private — and save it under “Save as template”. It stays on this device and is waiting for you next time. Put [[name]] wherever something changes each time, for instance [[start date]] or [[invoice number]]; opening the template then asks for exactly those and leaves everything else alone. A field is ordinary text, so it survives a trip through Word, PDF and plain text, and it works on a PDF page too. Tables travel with the template; column widths and merged cells do not survive an editing round.
