Redact PDF

Draw black boxes to permanently hide sensitive information.

Drop a PDF to redact

or click to browse

Choose File
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Redaction Complete!

How to redact a PDF

  1. Upload the PDF. A page appears in the canvas area so you can navigate with prev / next.
  2. Drag rectangles over anything sensitive — names, account numbers, addresses, photos, signatures. Pick black, white, or gray for the fill colour.
  3. Click Save Redacted PDF. The rectangles are permanently burned into the page content, and the original text underneath is not written to the output.

Real redaction vs. "black box over text"

Drawing a black highlight in an ordinary PDF editor does not delete the text — anyone can copy-paste the content straight out, or open the file in a tool that ignores the highlight layer. Our redact tool rebuilds the page image with the rectangles baked in, so the underlying text is physically gone from the output file. This is the level needed for legal and regulatory purposes like HIPAA, GDPR, or Indian DPDP compliance.

Frequently asked

Can someone still recover the redacted text?

No — the saved PDF contains only the image of the redacted page. There is no text layer behind the black boxes to retrieve.

Does this work across multiple pages at once?

You redact page-by-page. For documents with the same sensitive field repeating in the same position on every page (like a form header or footer), manual per-page redaction is the safest method — it lets you visually confirm each instance before committing, which is the right approach for legal-grade redaction where a single miss is the difference between compliant and disclosed.

Is the output searchable?

No, the redacted page becomes image-only. For a searchable redacted output, run OCR on the saved file — OCR will skip the black boxes and recover text from the untouched regions.

Why is this a Pro feature?

Real per-pixel page rebuilding is computationally heavier than drawing text on top of a PDF. The Pro tier funds the rendering cost on mid-range Android devices and ongoing work on the redaction quality.

Privacy: Every page rebuild happens in your browser using PDF.js and pdf-lib. Sensitive documents stay on your device — that is the whole point of doing redaction right.