Redact a PDF
Remove names, numbers and anything else that must not be readable — deleted from the document itself, not covered up. Nothing is stored.
- Never stored
- No queue, 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.
Why a black rectangle is not a redaction
This is the mistake that has ended careers and lost court cases, so it is worth stating flatly: drawing a black box over text in a PDF hides nothing. The characters are still in the page's content stream, underneath the rectangle, and anyone can select them, copy them, or pull them out with a free tool in about four seconds. Every published redaction failure you have read about — the settlement figures, the witness names, the unredacted filings — was a document where someone drew a shape and believed it.
What happens here is the other order. The text inside your rectangle is deleted from the content stream first, and the box is drawn afterwards as a visual marker of where something was. Copy the redacted area and you get nothing, because there is nothing; extract the page text and the words are not there. The count of pieces removed is shown to you so that a redaction which silently matched nothing is visible rather than assumed.
Artwork is a separate problem and has a separate answer. A name inside a scanned page, or in a screenshot pasted into a report, is not text at all — it is pixels, and deleting text cannot touch it. Turning on the artwork option renders those pages afresh with the redaction already applied, so the pixels underneath are genuinely gone rather than covered. The cost is real and stated plainly: those pages become pictures, so any text on them stops being selectable, and the file gets larger.
A PDF keeps names in more places than the page, and the rest are not touched here. The bookmark outline, form field values, file attachments, the document information, the XMP metadata packet and the file name itself are all separate stores, and a name in any of them survives a perfect redaction of the page. So does an earlier version of the document if it was saved incrementally. Before a redacted file goes anywhere that matters, open the document properties and look, and run the result through a rebuild that discards what the pages no longer reach.
When you want something else
When the stakes are legal, use software built for the stakes. Adobe Acrobat Pro's redaction applies the same delete-then-mark logic and adds the thing this page has no way to offer: a sanitise step that strips metadata, attachments, hidden layers, scripts and previous saved revisions in one pass. For a court filing, that step is not optional.
The free equivalent is a two-command pipeline, and it is genuinely thorough. qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable in.pdf out.pdf exposes the document's structure as readable text so you can confirm with your own eyes that a name is gone, and exiftool -all:all= out.pdf clears the metadata. Following those with gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o final.pdf out.pdf rebuilds the file from what the pages actually reference, discarding orphaned objects. Verifying is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters.
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 stored anywhere?
No. Redaction stores nothing, 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.
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