Draw boxes over what must go. The pages you mark are re-drawn as pictures with the boxes painted on, so the text underneath is not in the file any more.
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Files are not uploaded - everything happens in your browser.
In most PDF editors, drawing a black rectangle over a name adds a shape on top of the text. The text is still in the file, underneath. Select the area and copy it, and the name comes out; open the file in another program and it may be visible; run any text extractor and it is there in full.
This has caused real, repeated embarrassment: court filings, government reports and corporate disclosures published with "redacted" names that anyone could copy out with two clicks. It is not an exotic failure mode, it is the normal consequence of covering text rather than removing it.
So this tool does not cover anything. It re-draws the marked pages as pictures, with your boxes painted on before the picture is made. What was under the box is not in the file in any form, because the page that is in the file was never a page of text.
A redacted page becomes an image, and that has consequences you should know before you use it. The text on that page is no longer selectable, searchable or readable by a screen reader. The page is also larger in bytes - an image of a page is bigger than its text.
Pages you do not mark are copied across untouched and keep everything: their text, their links, their fonts and their file size. So a forty-page report with two redacted pages still works normally for the other thirty-eight.
If the whole document must stay searchable, the honest answer is that genuine redaction cannot give you that for the redacted pages. You could run OCR on the result to recover searchable text around the boxes, which works, and loses the exact fonts.
The preview shows one page at a time, and you drag as many boxes as you need on each one. Move between pages with the arrows; your boxes stay where you put them on every page you have visited. A counter shows the total so far, and a clear button empties the current page if you want to start it again.
Boxes are stored as fractions of the page, so they land in the right place regardless of the preview size or the zoom level of your screen.
Draw generously. Letters have overhangs, and text sits a little above and below the line you see; a box that just touches the top of the characters can leave a readable sliver of the tallest ones. A millimetre of margin on each side costs nothing.
Always open the result and check it. Try to select the text in the redacted area - you will not be able to, because the whole page is a picture. If you want to be thorough, run the result through PDF to TXT and search the text that comes out for the name or number you removed. It should not be there at all.
Check the whole document too, not only the pages you marked. The same account number may appear in a header on page one, in a summary table on page three and in an appendix on page twelve. Redaction tools cannot find those for you.
Remember document properties as well. A PDF carries a title, author and sometimes the original file name, and a file called "smith-settlement-draft.pdf" says plenty before anyone opens it.
The resolution controls how the rasterised page looks. At 150 dpi the text on the page reads cleanly on screen and prints well, which suits almost everything. At 200 or 300 dpi it stays crisp under a magnifier or a projector, at a noticeably larger file size.
Avoid going below 150 dpi on a page with small print, because the rasterised text will look soft in a way readers notice.
The picture is saved as JPEG at high quality, which keeps the file manageable. On a page of pure line art you may prefer to redact at a higher resolution to keep the edges sharp.
Files are not uploaded - everything happens in your browser. Consider what redaction means: you have a document containing information so sensitive that it must be destroyed before the file is shared. Uploading that document to a website to have the sensitive part removed is the one thing you should not do.
Here the file is read locally, the pages are rendered locally, the boxes are painted locally and the new PDF is written in memory on your device. Nothing is transmitted at any point, so there is no copy of the unredacted document anywhere but on your own disk.
A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first with Unlock PDF, which also runs entirely in your browser.
Two libraries are fetched on demand for this tool: one to render the pages and one to write the new PDF, together about 1.8 MB. They are downloaded once, after you choose a file, and cached by your browser from then on.
Finally, a word about the original. Keep it somewhere safe and keep it separate. Redaction is not reversible, so the unredacted file is the only copy of what you removed, and sending the wrong one of the two files is the most common way a redaction effort is wasted. Name them so they cannot be confused at a glance.
Choose the file, drag black boxes over what must go, and press Redact. The marked pages are re-drawn as pictures with the content removed.
No. The page in the new file is a picture that was created with the boxes already painted on, so the original text is not in the file in any form.
Because that adds a shape on top of the text and the text is still there. It can be selected, copied or extracted, which is how several published "redacted" documents leaked.
Only the pages you mark. Every other page is copied across with its text intact.
No, and that is the unavoidable cost of real redaction. Other pages remain searchable.
Because a picture of a page takes more bytes than its text. Use PDF Compressor afterwards if the size matters.
No. Everything happens in your browser, which is exactly what you want for a document you are redacting.
No. Check the title, author and file name yourself - they often say more than people expect.
Your answer is stored in this browser only. It is not sent to us and no totals are counted.