Redaction that really removes the content
A black rectangle drawn on top of a PDF often hides nothing: the text underneath is still in the file and can be selected, copied or extracted. This tool redacts the safe way. When you apply your boxes, every page is rendered to an image, the boxes are burned in as solid black pixels, and a new PDF is built from those images. The covered text, and the hidden text layer, are simply not in the new file.
How to use it
- Choose a PDF. Pages appear in the viewer, up to 60 pages.
- Click and drag to draw a black box over anything sensitive, such as names, account numbers, addresses or signatures. Click the red × on a box to remove it.
- Optionally tick emails or long numbers, or type words, and use Find and mark text to place boxes automatically on matching text.
- Check every page by eye, then choose Apply redactions and download.
Browser-only processing
The file is opened, rendered and rebuilt entirely in your browser. It is never uploaded to a server, which matters for bank statements, ID documents, contracts and medical or legal paperwork. The trade-offs of this method are that the output pages are images, so you lose selectable text, search and accessibility features, and the file can be larger. If you need to keep text in the non-redacted parts, a desktop PDF editor with true redaction is the better tool.
Always verify the result
Automatic matches are estimates: text positions inside a line are calculated from its length, so a box can be slightly off. Scanned documents contain no searchable text, so they need manual boxes. After downloading, open the new PDF, check each marked area, and try selecting text there to confirm nothing remains. Remember that names or numbers can also appear in other places, such as headers, footers, metadata or the file name.