Every few weeks, an email lands that goes roughly like this: “Love the chore chart. Could you make one with my three kids’ names on it?”
For two years my answer has been no. Not because I don’t want to. Because every file on this site is a PDF I designed once, and I am not making forty custom versions of a chore chart, no matter how nicely you ask. I usually suggest a pen.
Well. I owe about forty of you an apology, because it turns out that answer was never mine to give.
Last month my daughter decided her habit tracker needed an edit: “Practice piano” out, “20 minutes of Minecraft” in. I crossed it out with a pen and squeezed the new one in above it. She looked at me the way you look at someone who writes in a library book.
So I went looking for a cleaner way, found one, and have since run about a dozen of my own pages through it. Here is the honest version.
The pen is still the right tool most of the time
One word, one chart, once? Cross it out, write the new word above it, done. That is a ten-second fix and I won’t pretend software beats a pen at it.
A clean edit earns its keep when the cross-out will keep bothering you:
- A chore chart that gets laminated and reprinted every Sunday, with each kid’s name where “Name:” goes.
- A reward chart as a gift, where the crossed-out word is the first thing anyone sees.
- Anything going on the wall, where you’ll look at your own handwriting every day and regret it a little.
- A page someone else will read — a meal plan in the language your mother actually reads, for instance.
If none of those apply, use the pen and close the tab.
How the swap actually works
The tool I’ve been using is EditTextImage. It does one job: you give it an image, type the words that are in it, type the words you want instead, and it repaints just those words — same typeface, same colour, same size, everything around them untouched. Thirty to sixty seconds.
- Get the page into an image. Every file here is a PDF and the tool takes images only, so open the PDF and export or screenshot the page as a PNG. Use the biggest version you can make — resolution is the whole ball game, as you’ll see.
- Type the original text exactly as printed, then the replacement. “Sweep the stairs” to “Feed the cat”, not a description of what you’d like.
- Type the whole word. My first attempt, I typed “Read” instead of “Reading” because I was in a hurry, and the image came back with an extra edit I hadn’t asked for. The tool warns that partial words are its weak spot. It is not warning idly.
- Generate, then zoom to 100% on the edited word before you commit. Ninety percent of the time it’s clean. The other ten percent you’ll spot immediately.
One more trick worth knowing: it will translate a whole image in one pass, which is how a Spanish version of the weekly meal planner ended up in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. She thinks I made it specially for her — and for one credit, in a way, I did.
Why it works on planner-style pages
This is the part I tested hardest, because I designed these files and nobody on earth knows what they’re supposed to look like better than I do.
The tool only repaints the letters you asked it to change. Grid lines, dotted rules, checkboxes, the little header flourish — untouched. My water tracker came back with the same typeface at the same weight; put the before and after side by side and you have to look twice to find the difference.
Text in photos holds up too. A sign shot at an angle stays at an angle — the perspective follows the original, which is the failure mode I expected most and saw least.
The limits that matter for printables
- PDFs don’t go in. Export the page as an image first and keep the PDF as your clean original.
- Resolution is the real cost. The free credit renders at about 1K — 1,024 pixels on the long edge, roughly 90 DPI on US Letter. Fine on screen, soft on paper. Credit-pack edits render at about 2K, around 185 DPI on Letter: fridge-grade, fine for a chart that gets handled daily, and worth a 100% zoom check before anything goes in a frame. If you need true 300-DPI print, this isn’t the path — the honest options are a pen or an email to me.
- Tiny text is the hard case. The smaller the letters, the less room there is to redraw them cleanly. Upload the highest-resolution export you have.
- Handwriting and heavily stylised fonts are harder than clean printed text. Most of my pages are the boring, legible kind, which happens to be exactly what it likes.
- It changes words and nothing else. If what you actually want is a different layout — more rows, another section — that’s not an edit, that’s a design request. Several of those emails have turned into printables, so keep them coming.
What it costs, and why I can say I like it
Signing up gets you one free credit, no card required. That’s enough to find out whether it handles your particular page — start there.
After that it’s credit packs, one-time: $14.90 for 40 edits, $26.90 for 100, $39.90 for 180 on the pricing page. No subscription, credits don’t expire, and a failed render is refunded automatically. Commercial rights are included, though you won’t need them for a chore chart.
Two things I noticed, and you can weigh them yourself. Their acceptable-use policy refuses identity documents, official paperwork and anything made to deceive — I’d rather recommend a tool that sometimes has to say no. And for the record, since this site now has a labelled paid post or two: nobody asked for this one. I spent my own $14.90, and I’m writing about it because it answered an email I answer every few weeks.
Whose file is it afterwards?
Yours to print — for the same reason every download here is free: it’s personal use, and putting your kid’s name on their chore chart is about as personal as use gets.
Two asks, the same ones that come with the printables themselves. Don’t repost the edited file as your own; if someone wants their own version, the original link costs you nothing. And don’t sell it. The full reasoning behind free-for-personal-use lives in why every printable here is free — short version: the line between “organised household” and “the reason I had to add a licence page” is about one resold PDF wide.
Most edits are still one word long, and the pen still wins those. But the chore chart with three real names, the reward chart that says the right kid, the meal plan in a language your family actually reads — those are worth ten minutes and one credit.
My daughter’s tracker now says “20 minutes of Minecraft” in the exact typeface of my original design. Somehow that’s more annoying than the pen.