Redact PDF
Remove text for good
Draw a box over anything that must not be readable, and the page is replaced by a picture of itself with that area filled in. The words underneath are not hidden — they stop existing in the file.
Questions
- Are my files uploaded anywhere?
- No. Every tool on this site runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript — your file is never uploaded to a server, because there is no server. You can confirm it by opening your browser’s network tab, or by disconnecting from the internet once the page has loaded: the tool still works.
- Can the text be recovered?
- No. Drawing a black rectangle over words in a PDF editor is the commonest way a redaction leaks — the text is still in the file underneath, and selecting it or running a text extractor reads it straight back. This tool does not do that. It replaces the page with an image of itself, so the redacted page is pixels and there is no text layer left to read. Before you are handed the file, the pixels inside every box are read back off the rendered page and checked to be solid black.
- What does a redacted page lose?
- Its text. A page you drew on can no longer be selected, searched or copied from, and it grows in size, because a picture of a page takes far more room than the instructions that drew it. Screen readers cannot read it either. That is the price of the text genuinely being gone.
- What happens to the rest of the document?
- Redacting rebuilds the whole file, and that removes comments, highlights, links, form fields and anything typed into them, bookmarks, attachments, and the document’s title and author — on every page, not just the redacted ones. This is not a side effect worth hiding: it is how the leftover copies of the removed text are guaranteed to go too. The tool lists exactly what will be lost before you commit, and none of it comes back.
- Do the pages I did not touch stay searchable?
- Yes. Only pages carrying a box are turned into images; the rest keep their text exactly as it was, because flattening a two-hundred-page document over one box would be its own kind of damage. The exception is the option to repeat your boxes on every page, for a header or footer that recurs — that rasterises the whole document, which is why it is off unless you ask for it.
- Does it remove the same words everywhere in the document?
- No — a box removes what is inside it, on the page you drew it on. If those words also appear on a page that kept its text, because of a repeated header or shared content, you are told which pages so you can decide. Only you can say whether the other appearances matter.