Redact PDF

How to redact a PDF

1. Drop a PDF file in the drop zone, or click it to choose one. The first page appears under Mark areas on the pages.
2. To hide a word, a name or a number wherever it appears, type it in Find text to redact and click Find and mark. Tick Match case to find only the exact capitalization. Every occurrence on every page is outlined in red.
3. To hide anything else (a signature, a photo, a table, a scanned line), drag on the page to draw a box. Use the arrows or the page number to move between pages.
4. Check every page. Remove a box you don’t want with Remove, empty a page with Clear this page, or start again with Clear all. Redact whole page blacks out the full page.
5. Choose the Resolution of redacted pages, then click Redact PDF and Download.

Why black boxes alone are not enough

Many “redacted” documents have leaked because someone drew black rectangles over text in a PDF editor. The rectangle hides the words on screen, but the text is still in the file: anyone can select it, copy it, or search it. Real redaction removes the information itself.

This tool does real redaction. Each page with at least one marked area is rendered to pixels at the chosen resolution, the black boxes are painted into those pixels, and the page is rebuilt as a single image. The original text, fonts, vector drawings, embedded images, links, comments and form fields of that page are not copied into the new file. What is under a black box no longer exists anywhere in the document.

Pages without any marked area are copied unchanged, so they stay sharp, searchable and light. The new file also carries no document metadata: the title, author, subject, keywords, creation software and dates of the original are removed.

What to know before you redact

• Redacted pages are no longer searchable. Because they become images, their remaining text can’t be selected, copied or found with Ctrl+F. Run OCR afterwards if you need searchable text; OCR can’t recover what is under the black boxes.
• Text search only finds real text. On a scanned page, the words are part of a picture: search finds nothing, so draw the boxes by hand. Text drawn as outlines or in images is also invisible to search.
• Boxes around found text are approximate. The position of each character is estimated from the text line, with a safety margin. Always look at the result, and enlarge a box by drawing another one if needed.
• Bookmarks, form fields and attachments of the original document are not kept in the new file. Links and comments on unchanged pages are kept.
• 200 DPI keeps small text legible; 300 DPI is sharper but makes larger files.

Privacy

The PDF is opened, rendered and rebuilt by your browser, on your device. Neither the original nor the redacted file is sent to a server.