Redact PDF

This removes text from a PDF permanently, deleting the words from the file rather than covering them with a black rectangle. Drawing a black rectangle over a name is not redaction. The characters are still in the file, underneath the box, and anyone can select them, copy them, or pull them out with a text extractor in seconds. This is not a theoretical flaw — it is how court filings, government releases and corporate disclosures have leaked the exact information they were published to hide. This tool deletes the text from inside the document instead, permanently. The black box is still drawn, because a redacted page should look redacted, but the box is only decoration: the words are gone before it is painted on.

How to use it

1. Open your PDF. Every page is drawn so you can read what you are removing.
2. Drag a rectangle over anything that has to go — an account number, an address, a fee, a name. Mark as many as you like across as many pages as you like.
3. Press Redact. The text objects under each rectangle are deleted from the page's content stream, then a black box is drawn where they were.
4. Check it yourself before you send it: open the file you get back and try to select the text under the black. There is nothing there.

Examples

• A bank statement with the account number removed before it goes to a landlord
• A signed contract with the fee taken out before it is reused as a template

What this tool cannot do

• It removes text. It cannot remove what was never text — a scanned page is a picture of words, so there is nothing in the file to delete. Use the image blur tool for those.
• Where a glyph's exact width cannot be measured, the estimate is deliberately generous. The failure mode is a neighbouring word removed unnecessarily, never a word left behind that should have gone.
• Check the result before you send it. No tool can promise you never need to — including this one.

Frequently asked questions

Is a black box over text the same as redacting it?

No, and the difference has caused real harm. A black rectangle is just a shape drawn on top; the text underneath is untouched and stays fully readable to anything that reads the file rather than looks at it. Select the area, copy, paste — and there it is. The same goes for a black highlighter in most PDF readers, and for covering text with a white box. Every one of those hides the words from a person glancing at the page and hands them straight to anyone who opens the file properly.

How do I know the text is really gone?

Check it, and do not take our word for it. Open the redacted file, try to select the text under the black rectangle, and paste it somewhere — you will get nothing, because there is nothing there. If you want to be thorough, run the result through our PDF to Text tool and read what comes out. We test this the same way on every build: the tool redacts a document, the text is extracted again, and the build fails if the removed words are still findable.

Does this work on scanned documents?

Not in the way you need. A scan is a picture of a page, so there is no text in the file to delete — the words are pixels. Drawing a box over them does genuinely cover them in that case, but only because there was never selectable text to begin with, and the original pixels can still sit underneath the box in the image data. For a scan, the safe approach is to export the page as an image, paint over the area in an image editor, and rebuild the PDF from that. This tool is for documents that hold real text.

What about the rest of the file's hidden data?

Redaction removes the words you marked; it does not clean the rest of the document. A PDF also carries a title, an author name, the software that made it, creation and modification timestamps, and sometimes an outline or comments — none of which are on the page you can see. If the document is going somewhere sensitive, run it through our PDF metadata remover afterwards. The two tools are meant to be used together.

Is my document uploaded?

No. The file is opened, rewritten and saved entirely inside your browser, on your own device, and no part of it is sent to us or anyone else. Load the page, disconnect from the internet, and it still works. This is not a small detail for this particular tool — a redaction service that first took a copy of your unredacted document would be handing over the exact thing you came here to protect.