Redact PDF
Draw black boxes to permanently hide sensitive information.
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Draw black boxes to permanently hide sensitive information.
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This is the part that catches people out, and it has ended careers. In most PDF editors, drawing a black box adds a shape on top of the page. The text underneath is still in the file, byte for byte. Select the area and copy it, open the document in a different reader, run a text extractor over it, or simply move the box — and the words are right there.
It keeps happening to organisations with legal departments. Court filings, government disclosures and corporate submissions have all been published with names, addresses and settlement figures sitting under black rectangles that anyone could lift out with a copy-and-paste.
A covered-up PDF also gives you no warning. It looks perfectly redacted on screen. The failure only shows up after the file has been sent.
Any page you have drawn on is rebuilt from scratch. The page is rendered at high resolution with your boxes composited in, and that image becomes the new page. The original text content stream — the actual instructions that placed those characters — is not carried over. It is not hidden, not covered, not moved off the visible area. It is not in the output file.
So there is nothing underneath to recover. Select the redacted area and you get nothing, because there is no text object there. Run an extraction tool over the file and the redacted words do not appear, because they were never written into it. Open it in any reader on any platform and the result is identical, because the redaction is baked into the page rather than depending on a viewer choosing to honour an annotation.
Pages you did not touch are copied across losslessly. Their text stays selectable, searchable and sharp — only the pages carrying redactions are rebuilt, so a 60-page report with two sensitive paragraphs keeps 58 pages fully intact.
The renderer also adapts to the device. Mobile browsers cap how large a canvas can be, and a big page at full export resolution can quietly exceed that limit and produce a blank sheet — which, on a redaction tool, would be the worst possible failure. The export scale is clamped per page so that cannot happen, and the redaction is drawn on a page that definitely exists.
Q3-layoffs-final.pdf tells a story before anyone opens it.There is nothing to recover. Redacted pages are rebuilt as new page content and the original text stream is not carried into the output file, so the words are absent rather than concealed. Copy-and-paste returns nothing, text extractors find nothing, and no reader can reveal it, because there is no hidden layer to reveal.
Yes. Draw boxes on any page, use the navigation to move through the document, and every marked page is processed when you save. Undo and Clear work per page, so tidying one page does not disturb the rest.
Pages you never drew on keep their full text layer and stay searchable. Pages that were redacted are rebuilt as page images, which is precisely what makes the redaction irreversible. When the finished document needs to be searchable end to end, run it through OCR afterwards — that writes a fresh text layer from what is actually visible, so the redacted content stays gone while the remaining text becomes selectable again.
Yes. Pages are rendered well above screen and print resolution, and the export quality is checked so it is never worse than the reference render. Redacted pages print cleanly alongside the untouched ones.
Yes, and it is straightforward — a scan is already page images, so drawing a box over an area and rebuilding the page removes that content outright. This works the same way whether the source was a scan or a born-digital PDF.
Worth handling separately, because metadata is not on the page. Author, title, subject, creation software and often the original filename ride along inside the document. Edit Metadata shows every field and lets you clear it — a sensible final step before releasing a redacted file.
It is the tool where getting it wrong has real consequences, and it carries the most engineering: full page reconstruction, per-device canvas limits, and quality guards so a redacted page can never come out blank or degraded. Every Pro tool includes three free runs per device so you can put your own document through it and confirm the result before deciding.
No — and on this tool in particular that is the entire point. Rendering, redaction and rebuilding all happen inside this browser tab, and the file goes straight to your downloads. The document you are removing sensitive information from is never transmitted to anyone. Go offline before you start if you want to see that for yourself.
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.