Redact PDF
Runs in your browser — your files are never uploaded.
Drawing a black rectangle over a PDF hides nothing: the words underneath stay in the file, and anyone can select, copy or extract them with ordinary software. That mistake has exposed witness names, medical records and settlement figures in documents published by law firms, courts and newspapers. This tool does not do that. It rebuilds every page you redact from pixels, so the text you covered is not concealed — it no longer exists in the file. And because the whole thing runs inside your browser, the document never leaves your computer in the first place.
How to use Redact PDF
- 1
Drop the PDF in. It opens on your device — nothing is uploaded.
- 2
Drag a box over each thing that should go. Move between pages with Previous and Next; boxes stay on the page you drew them on.
- 3
Press Redact and download. The pages you marked are rebuilt as images with the text destroyed; untouched pages keep their text exactly as it was.
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Frequently asked questions
Why is drawing a black box in another editor not enough?+
Because a PDF stores the text and the graphics separately. A filled rectangle is drawn on top of the words, not in place of them, so the text is still sitting in the file — select it, copy it, or run any extraction tool and it comes straight back out. Real incidents have followed exactly this route, including court filings and government reports published with "redactions" that could be undone with a mouse drag.
How does this tool remove the text for good?+
It renders each redacted page to an image, paints the black areas onto those pixels, and rebuilds the page from the result. There is no text layer left on that page, so nothing can be recovered — not because it is hidden, but because it was never written into the output file.
What is the downside?+
Pages you redact stop being searchable or selectable, and the file gets larger, because those pages are now images. That is the price of the guarantee. Only the pages you actually mark are affected — every other page is copied across untouched, with its text intact.
Is my document uploaded anywhere?+
No. It is opened, rendered and rebuilt entirely inside your browser, which is the only honest way to offer this. A redaction tool that uploads your file has already sent the unredacted original to someone else's server.
Does it remove metadata too?+
Redacted pages are rebuilt from scratch, so their original text and any hidden layers do not survive. Document-level metadata such as the author and title is a separate matter — the remove-pdf-metadata tool handles that.
Can I redact a scanned document?+
Yes. A scan is already an image, so the black areas are painted onto it the same way. If the scan has been through OCR and carries a hidden text layer, rebuilding the page destroys that layer as well, which is exactly what you want.