Redact PDF
Permanently black out sensitive content. Free — no signup, no watermarks.
How it works
- 1Open your PDF and go to a page with sensitive content.
- 2Drag a box over anything to black it out — a name, a number, a signature, a photo. Or search for text to mark every occurrence at once.
- 3Click Redact and download. The content under each box is permanently removed, not just hidden.
Common questions
›Is this real redaction, or just a black box drawn on top?
Real redaction. A black box drawn over text leaves the text fully recoverable — anyone can copy it, run it through a text extractor, or delete the box. This tool rebuilds each redacted page as a flattened image, so the content underneath is genuinely gone. That's also why redacted pages lose their selectable text: there's nothing left underneath to select.
›Why did the whole page lose its selectable text after I redacted one line?
To guarantee the hidden content is unrecoverable, the entire page is flattened to an image — which removes the text layer for that whole page. Pages you didn't touch keep their normal text. It's the safe tradeoff: no recoverable text means no leak.
›Does the search find every occurrence?
It finds matches in the document's text layer, but it can miss text stored inside images, or text split oddly in the file — so always visually check every page before trusting it. Drawing boxes by hand is the reliable backstop.
›Do you remove hidden metadata too?
Yes — the document's title, author, and creator fields are cleared on the way out, since those can carry the very information you're trying to remove.
›Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. This tool runs entirely in your browser — the file is opened, processed, and saved on your own device. There is no upload in the code path, which you can verify by watching the network tab, or by loading the page and then switching to airplane mode: the tool still works.