Redact PDF
Redact a PDF for real: drag a black box over a name, and that page comes back as an image with the text underneath deleted.
Drag & drop your file here, or
Off, only the pages you draw on become images. On, every page does — nothing left in the file stays selectable or searchable.
How to use
- Choose the document under PDF file and wait for the pages to render into the viewer beneath it.
- Drag across anything that has to disappear. On a phone or tablet, switch the toggle from Scroll to Draw boxes first, or your finger just scrolls. Tap a box to take it off again, or use Clear boxes to wipe the lot.
- Hit Redact & download. The result saves as report-redacted.pdf, borrowing the original name, and the status line confirms it. Open the file and try to select where a box was; there is nothing left to catch.
About this tool
Painting a black rectangle over a name in a PDF editor hides it from your eyes and from nobody else's. The words are still sitting in the file. Drag across the rectangle, paste into any text editor, and there the name is. To redact a PDF properly the content has to be destroyed, and that is what happens on this page.
Load a file and the pages render into a scrolling viewer. Drag across whatever has to go. Every drag leaves a black box that you can click again to delete, and the counter above the viewer keeps score, reading something like 4 boxes on 2 pages. A drag under one percent of the page width or height is thrown away, so a stray click cannot plant an invisible marker you never notice.
Press Redact & download and each page carrying a box is re-rendered at double size, filled solid black where you marked it, and encoded as a JPEG at quality 0.85. Those images go into a freshly built document alongside the untouched pages, which are copied across as they were. Title, author, subject, keywords, producer and creator all come out empty, and the XMP metadata block is dropped from the catalog.
Only the pages you drew on turn into images by default. The rest keep their text, which holds the file size down and leaves the document searchable. When something is sensitive cover to cover, tick Rasterize every page (maximum safety) before exporting and no text survives anywhere in the result.
Before you rely on it
- A redacted page is a picture from that moment on. Whatever text remains on it cannot be selected, searched or read aloud by a screen reader. That is the cost of genuinely deleting the words rather than covering them.
- Pictures weigh more than text. Rasterizing all 80 pages of a scanned agreement can multiply the file size several times over, which matters if there is an attachment limit at the other end.
- Only what you mark comes out. Tracking down every mention of a name across a long document is your job; dump the text with PDF to Text and search that first, then come back and draw.
- The output is a new document, so bookmarks and the outline of the original do not survive. Links and form fields on a rasterized page get flattened into the image too.
Frequently asked questions
Can anyone recover what was under a black box?
Not from the file you download. The page is rebuilt as a flat image with the black already painted into the pixels, and the original text object is never copied into the new document. There is no layer to peel back, no object to fish out with a PDF parser.
Why can't I select text on a page I redacted?
Because the page is a photograph of itself now. Removing text for real means throwing away the text layer, and the image that replaces it holds pixels rather than characters. Everything still reads normally to a human eye at 100 percent zoom, it just cannot be copied.
The pages I didn't touch still have selectable text. Should I worry?
Usually not, since untouched pages are exactly as they were and nothing sensitive was on them. If the whole document is confidential, or you are unsure what a page in the middle says, turn on Rasterize every page and every single page gets flattened.
How is this different from the whiteout in the Fill, Sign & Edit tool?
Whiteout paints over content and leaves the original text intact underneath, which that page admits in as many words. Use it for tidying up a form you are filling in. Use this one when the words themselves have to stop existing.
Does it work on a scanned PDF with no text layer?
Yes, and scans are the easy case. Every page is already an image, so drawing a box and re-rendering behaves exactly the same. The redacted result is one more image with a black rectangle in it, and there was never any text to extract.
Will the redacted pages look worse than the original?
Slightly, if you go looking. Pages are rendered at twice their normal resolution and saved as JPEG at 0.85 quality, which is sharp on screen and fine for printing a contract. Very fine hairlines and small type can pick up a faint softness compared with true vector text.
Missing something in Redact PDF? Suggest a feature →
Tell someone who needs this.