Redact PDF

Genuinely hides part of a PDF. It does not draw a rectangle over the words — those would stay in the file and come back with a copy-paste: the page is redrawn from scratch, and there is nothing left to recover underneath the black. The document never leaves your device.

Your file stays on your device: nothing is uploaded

How it works

The pages you touch are drawn as an image at the resolution you choose, the rectangles black out the pixels, and the page is rebuilt from that image: on that page no text exists any more, not even the text that stays visible. The other pages are left as they are — vector, light, with text still selectable. At the end the tool reopens the file it just produced and checks two things: that no extractable text is left on the redacted pages, and that the word you searched for no longer appears anywhere. If either check fails, the file is not handed to you and we say so: we prefer an error to a document that looks redacted without being redacted. What this tool does not do, and is better known upfront: it does not touch document metadata (author, title — use “Remove PDF metadata” for those), it does not find text inside a scan, because there is no text there to find, and it does not decide by itself what is sensitive.

Your files are never uploaded. Anywhere.

Not to a server of ours, not to a third party, never. When you pick a file it stays in your browser’s memory: it is read, processed and written back on your device, and you save the result yourself. There is no path that takes it elsewhere, because there is no server to send it to.

Processed locallyFormats are handled by WebAssembly code running in your browser, not by a remote service.
Nothing to upload, nothing to wait forOther services send your file to a server and then send it back to you. Here the file never leaves: there is no upload to wait for.
No accountNo sign-up, no email, no daily limits to get around by paying.
No files to deleteOthers promise to erase your files after an hour. We have nothing to erase: they never reached us.

Other tools in this category

Compress PDFLightens scans while keeping the text searchable.Protect PDFAdd a password, or remove it if you know it.Merge PDFsSeveral PDFs into one document, in the order you choose.PDF to imagesEvery page becomes a JPG or PNG, at the resolution you choose.Split PDFOne page per file, by ranges, or in blocks.Organise PDF pagesRotate, delete and reorder pages on a grid.Fill in a PDF formFills a PDF form’s fields and tells you what it wrote, what was locked and what was not.Crop PDFRemoves the white margins, by itself or with the measurements you choose.Lock a PDF formFreezes a form’s values: they stay visible, but nobody can change them.Sign a PDF by handDraw your signature and place it on the document. This is not a digital signature.Pages per sheetPuts 2, 4, 6 or 9 pages on a single sheet, or lays them out as a booklet.Images to PDFSeveral photos or scans in one PDF, one per page.Watermark PDFOverlay a word like “DRAFT” or “CONFIDENTIAL” on every page.Page numbers on PDFNumber the pages of a PDF, choosing position, format and where to start.Remove PDF metadataAuthor, dates, originating software and the XMP block.