Redact PDF

The mistake this tool is built to avoid

Almost every free "redact a PDF" tool draws a black rectangle on top of the text.

The text is still there, underneath it. Select the area, copy, paste — and the words come straight back. Any text extractor reads them without even trying. This is not theoretical: governments, law firms and newspapers have all published documents redacted this way, and the names they were hiding were read out of the file within hours.

This tool does not draw a rectangle. A page you mark is rendered down to pixels, the black boxes are painted onto those pixels, and the picture becomes the page. There is no text layer left for anyone to copy out of. The words are not hidden. They are gone.

How to use it

• Click Click to upload or drop your PDF on the page
• Drag across anything that should be removed — names, numbers, a signature, a whole paragraph
• Use the arrows to move through the pages and mark as many as you need
• Change the box colour and border if you want something other than solid black
• Press Redact and save

The price, stated plainly

A page you redact becomes an image. Its text stops being selectable and searchable, and the file gets a bit bigger.

That is not a limitation to be engineered away — it is the entire mechanism. Anything that kept the text layer would keep the text, which is exactly the failure above. If the words are still selectable, they were never removed.

Pages you do not mark are copied through untouched and keep their real text. So a fifty-page report with one name to remove pays the price on one page only.

The colour of the box is only a colour

Black is the default because it is what everyone expects a redaction to look like. You can

change the fill to anything, and add a border in a second colour if you want the marks to

read as deliberate rather than as a printing fault.

None of that changes what is removed. The words are gone the moment the page is

rendered — the box is painted onto a picture that no longer contains them. A white box

takes away exactly as much as a black one; it just looks like blank paper afterwards.

While you are placing marks, each one also carries a thin dashed red ring. That is the

editor showing you where the mark is, so a white box on a white page is still visible to

you. It is not drawn into the saved PDF.

What is removed, and what is not

Removed: everything under a box you drew — text, images, signatures, table cells, anything drawn on that part of the page.

Not removed:

• The shape of what was there. A one-word black box is visibly one word long. If that matters, mark a wider area
• The same information elsewhere. If a name appears on four pages, mark it on all four
• Context. "The [ ] family of Oak Street" is not anonymous. Redaction is not a substitute for reading the document
• Metadata. Author, title and the rest live outside the page. Use Remove Image Metadata for images, and check your PDF's properties separately

Before you rely on it

Open the finished PDF and try to select the blacked-out area. Copy it. Paste it somewhere. You should get nothing.

Do that check the first time. It takes ten seconds and it is the only way to know that any redaction tool — this one included — did what it claimed.

What people use it for

• Removing names or addresses before sharing a document
• Blacking out account and card numbers on a statement
• Hiding salaries or prices in a contract sent to a third party
• Removing a signature before sending a form as a sample
• Anonymising records before they go to a researcher or a journalist
• Taking personal details out of a document before it is published

Good to know

• Nothing is uploaded. Rendering and redacting both happen in this page
• The original PDF on your disk is untouched; you download a new file
• Nothing happens until you press Redact and save
• Redacted pages are rendered at roughly 150 dpi, which stays crisp on screen and in normal printing
• A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first — use Unlock PDF
• This cannot be undone in the saved file. Keep the original if you might need it
• Works on a phone and tablet, though a mouse makes marking small areas much easier

Related tools

• Crop PDF — hide the edges of a page (does *not* remove content)
• Unlock PDF — take the password off first if there is one
• Protect PDF — put a password on the redacted copy
• Blur or Pixelate Part of a Photo — the same job for an image
• Remove Image Metadata — strip the data that is not on the page