Redact PDF
Remove text and images for good, rather than covering them up.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
Redaction here removes the content rather than covering it. Every page carrying a redaction is rebuilt from pixels: the boxes are drawn into the page, the page is rendered at the resolution you choose, and the render becomes the new page. The original content stream is discarded rather than edited, so there is nothing underneath to select, copy or search. Pages with no redactions are copied through untouched.
Whenever a document has to go out with something taken out of it: names in a court filing, salaries in a board pack, an account number on an invoice, patient details in a medical record, an internal comment in a contract going to the other side.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page and draw boxes over whatever has to go. Each box is one redaction.
- Add a phrase under find and redact to catch every occurrence of a name or a number wherever it appears, instead of hunting page by page.
- Set the resolution for the rebuilt pages. 200 dpi reads well on screen and prints acceptably; 300 is better for print and produces a larger file.
- Leave keep the document searchable on unless you have a reason not to, and leave remove metadata on - a document's properties often hold the very name you have just taken off the page.
- Press Redact, then open the result and try to select the redacted text. There will be nothing there.
Drawing a black rectangle over text is not redaction, and the mistake has leaked court records, medical files and government documents repeatedly for twenty years. The rectangle is a drawing instruction added on top; the text underneath is still in the content stream, where anyone can select it, copy it or pull it out with a two-line script. The same is true of cropping.
Rebuilding from pixels is the only approach a browser can take that is genuinely safe, and it is deliberately blunt. The boxes are drawn into the document first and the page is rendered afterwards rather than the other way round, so no rounding in raster space can leave a one-pixel sliver of the original visible along an edge. There is no underneath, because the underneath was thrown away.
Losing search would be a real cost, so the surviving text is put back. The text layer is extracted before anything is drawn, every run falling inside a redaction box is dropped, and the rest is drawn back invisibly over the image. The document stays searchable and the redacted words are genuinely absent - the combination people assume a black box gives them and it almost never does.
The trade-off is size and fidelity on the pages you touched. A vector page that becomes a 200 dpi JPEG is usually several times larger, and links, form fields and annotations on that page do not survive the rebuild - which is why only affected pages are rebuilt. Check the result rather than trusting it: search for the word you removed, then select across the box and paste.
What this tool cannot do
- Pages containing redactions are replaced by images at the resolution you choose, so they grow, stop scaling cleanly, and lose any links, form fields or annotations they carried.
- Find and redact matches text within a single run, so a phrase broken across a line or a change of font can be missed. Read the result before sending it.
- A scanned document has no text layer, so find and redact has nothing to search. Draw the boxes by hand, or run OCR PDF first.
- Redaction removes what is on the page. Content elsewhere in the file - attachments, bookmark titles, an embedded XMP record - is a separate matter; metadata removal is offered here and Sanitise PDF goes further.
Questions people ask
- Is this real redaction, or just a black box?
- Real. The pages you redact are rendered to images with the boxes painted in, and those images replace the pages, so the original text objects are not in the output file at all. A black rectangle drawn over text leaves the text sitting underneath it, which is how redaction failures end up in the news.
- How can I be sure the text is really gone?
- Check it, in two ways that take seconds. Open the output and search for a redacted word: there should be no match. Then select across the redacted area, copy, and paste it into a text editor: nothing should arrive.
- Can it redact every occurrence of a name?
- Yes. Type the phrase into find and redact and every matching run of text is boxed, throughout the document or within a page range you set. Matching is case-insensitive, and a regular expression is available for patterns such as account numbers. Because matching works run by run, a phrase split across a line break can be missed.
- Why did my file get bigger?
- Because the redacted pages are now images. A page of vector text is compact; the same page as a 200 dpi JPEG is usually several times larger. Only pages carrying redactions are converted, so the effect is proportional to how much you redacted. Dropping to 150 dpi helps.
- Does it clean up the document properties as well?
- Yes, by default. Metadata routinely holds the author's name, the original file path and the software that produced it - sometimes the exact name you have just taken off the page. The toggle can be switched off when you need the properties intact.
- Does the file get uploaded to be redacted?
- No, and for this tool that is the whole argument. A document you are redacting is by definition one with something sensitive in it, and sending it to a server to have the sensitive part removed is backwards. Rendering, masking and rewriting all happen in Web Workers in your browser.