Redact a PDF
Remove names, numbers and anything else that must not be readable — deleted from the document itself, not covered up. All on your own device.
- Processed on your device
- No upload, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your PDF
Drop the document. Every page appears large enough to aim at a single word.
Drag over what must go
Draw a box over each piece of text. Undo and Clear are one click away, and nothing changes until you save.
Redact and download
The covered text is deleted from the file, then the black boxes are drawn on top.
Frequently asked questions
Is this different from drawing a black rectangle?
Completely, and this is the whole point. A black rectangle drawn in a PDF editor hides nothing: the characters are still in the file, and anyone can select them, copy them, or extract them with a free tool. Newspapers and government departments have leaked exactly this way. Here the text is removed from the page's content stream first, and the box is drawn afterwards — select the black area in any reader and there is nothing to copy.
Is my document uploaded?
No. Redaction runs entirely in your browser, which matters more here than for any other tool: the documents people redact are the ones they least want to hand to a website.
What about photographs and scans under the box?
Text is deleted from the content stream, but pixels in an image are a different matter. Switch on "Also destroy artwork underneath" and the affected pages are rebuilt as flattened images, so what was under the box no longer exists in the file. It costs the text layer on those pages, which is why it is a choice rather than the default.
Can I check that it worked?
Yes, and you should. Open the result and try to select the redacted area, or run it through PDF to Text — the words should be gone. Verifying a redaction before sending it is a good habit whatever tool you used.
Does it remove metadata too?
Not yet. Author names and titles live in the document information, not the page. Check those separately before publishing something sensitive.
Good to know: Text is removed from the page content; if a name also appears in bookmarks, form fields, attachments or document metadata, those are separate places and are not touched. Redacting text inside a scanned image needs the artwork option, which flattens those pages and removes their text layer.