QuireFree · No upload · No account
Annotate a PDF online: highlight, comment and draw
Open a PDF below to highlight passages, leave notes, add text boxes, draw freehand and place images. Annotations are saved as standard PDF annotations, so they show up in other PDF readers too.
The PDF is processed in your browser and never uploaded.
Prefer it in Chrome? Install the Quire PDF extension
How it works
Open the PDF with the Open button, or drop it on the tool.
Select text and choose Highlight, or pick a tool from the toolbar: Note, Text, Draw or Image.
Use the search box and the Pages panel to move around long documents.
Click Save a copy to keep your annotated PDF.
Questions
Plain answers
What this tool does, and what it does not.
Will my highlights show up in other PDF apps?
Yes. Highlights, notes, text boxes, drawings and images are written into the saved PDF as standard annotations, which Acrobat, Preview and browser PDF viewers display.
Can I highlight a scanned PDF?
You can draw on it and add notes and text boxes, but text highlighting needs real text in the PDF. Quire does not run OCR, so a scanned page has no selectable text.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The page and its PDF engine (Mozilla’s PDF.js) load from quireapps.com, and after that your file is opened, edited and saved inside your browser tab. The file is never sent to a server, and there is no analytics or tracking on this page. You can check this yourself in your browser’s developer tools under Network.
Is it free? Do I need an account?
It is free, with no account, no sign-up, no watermark and no daily limit. Files can be up to 100 MB.
Does Quire keep a copy of my file?
No. The document exists only in the open tab. If you close or reload the tab, unsaved edits are gone, so use Save a copy when you are done. The only things the page stores in your browser are your light or dark theme choice and, if you tick “Save signature”, the signatures you chose to reuse.
Can I change the existing text in a PDF?
No. Quire adds things on top of the page: highlights, notes, new text boxes, drawings, images and signatures. It does not rewrite text that is already in the PDF.
Which browsers does it work in?
It is tested in Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome and Edge. It is built on PDF.js, which also runs in current Firefox and Safari, but those have had less testing here. In Chrome and Edge, Save a copy lets you pick where the file goes; in other browsers it downloads.