Sure you can do it with Pdftk (or stapler these days), and a mish-mash of pdfinfo, Imagemagick and so on but the GUI programs mostly seem pretty bad offerings considering they're a fairly thin shell around library operations.
It’s free and does not require an account (I don’t like websites that force you to sign up to do anything)
Disclosure: I’m the solo developer behind it
You can add (“merge”), remove, delete pages, which is technically editing.
You can annotate the document by adding text, pictures, signatures, checkboxes as well as fill PDF form fields: unfortunately as you noticed you cannot “edit” existing text.
(I initially used the term annotator but it confused people so much that I changed it for edit and editor)
Adobes OCR can't handle a simple black-white tax document. To say nothing of OCRing scans. God help you if one text field wasn't recognized, because you sure as hell can't add the missing field.
And handy functions like "combine two PDF pages into one" (for example, combining front and back scan of something) are always easier to do by Googling than by using any software, even when you pay for it.
For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.
Since CoreGraphics on MacOS has fairly rich PDF support, Preview can do some degree of PDF manipulation: reorder pages, delete pages, insert pages, rotate, crop, annotate, etc.
> Ah I see what you mean, I was talking more about “editing” in the sense being able to fill all kinds of form entry and edit them and other text.
> For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.
Maybe, fortunately, most PDFs I consume are the reading kind.
It's meant as a scanning tool but works just fine without scanning just drag and drop a pdf on it.
It doesn't do in-page editing or annotation, it's "one layer above" that.
It's a crazy timeline we're on.
Per Wikipedia, PDF is a standard that was originally developed by Adobe. It was a proprietary standard for ~15 years before it became an open standard.
Nowadays, the relationship between Adobe and PDF is like Google and Chromium. Other PDF tools are playing catch up, but it’s en enormous amount of tedious work that mist would only do for a good paycheck, which is hard to find outside of Adobe.