How to edit a LaTeX résumé PDF without the .tex file

Templates made with LaTeX (Jake's Resume, Awesome-CV, moderncv and most Overleaf templates) use TeX fonts such as CMR10 and CMBX10, place every word at an exact position, and draw link underlines as separate lines rather than as part of the text. Many PDF editors replace the line with Arial or Helvetica, turn it all one colour, or leave the old underline behind.

1. 1Open the PDF editor and choose your résumé PDF.
2. 2Pick Edit text in the toolbar. Every line of text gets a dashed outline.
3. 3Click the line you want to change and type. Bold and italic parts, and blue link words, keep their own style.
4. 4Press Esc when you're done, check the line, and download the PDF.

The old words are deleted from the file, together with the underlines drawn under them, so nothing shows through or can be copied out of the new PDF.

• Letters the résumé already uses are written with its own embedded font. TeX fonts are usually embedded as subsets, so a letter that never appeared in the original falls back to a similar standard font.
• Short changes (a date, a company name, a number, a few words) look seamless. Rewriting a whole paragraph is better done in the source.
• The clickable area of a link stays where it was. If you change a link's wording a lot, check that it still sits over the word.

Click a line without changing it and it stays exactly as it was: the editor only rewrites lines you actually change.

If you need to restructure the whole document, PDF to Word gives you an editable .docx with real headings and lists, though the LaTeX look will change. If the edited PDF is too large for a job portal, Compress PDF shrinks it without touching the text.