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Redact PDF

Black out private details in a PDF so they are really deleted, not just hidden under a box.

Maintained by BrowserTools · Last updated 2026-09-29

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Redacting a document means removing information before you share it: a name in a court filing, an account number on a bank statement, a salary in a contract, a patient's details in a report. The classic mistake is drawing a black rectangle over the text in a PDF editor. The page looks redacted, but the words are still stored underneath, and anyone can select them, copy them or extract them with a free tool. Lawyers, government agencies and large companies have all published documents this way and had the hidden text recovered within hours. This tool avoids that problem by rebuilding every page you redact from scratch, so what is under the black box no longer exists in the file.

Frequently asked questions

Is the redacted text really gone?
Yes, on every page that has a box. That page is rendered to an image, the boxes are painted onto the pixels, and the new PDF contains only that image. The original text, fonts, vector drawings and hidden layers of the page are not copied, so there is nothing left to select, search or extract. The tool re-reads the finished file and confirms that no text remains on those pages.
Why is drawing a black rectangle in a normal PDF editor not enough?
A shape drawn on top of a PDF is just another object placed over the page. The text underneath is still in the file, so it can be selected, copied, found with search or pulled out by any text extraction tool. Real redaction has to delete the content, which is what this tool does by rebuilding redacted pages.
Why can I no longer select text on the redacted pages?
Because those pages are now pictures. Removing only the covered words while keeping the rest of the text layer would require editing the PDF's content stream, which is complex and easy to get wrong with some fonts and encodings. Flattening the whole page is the reliable way to make sure nothing survives. Pages without boxes keep their text. If you need the redacted pages to be searchable again, run them through an OCR tool afterwards.
Why is the redacted PDF bigger than the original?
Text is stored very compactly, while an image of a page takes more space. At 200 dpi a typical A4 or Letter page becomes a JPEG of a few hundred kilobytes. Choose 150 dpi for smaller files or 300 dpi when small print must stay sharp. Only pages with boxes are converted, unless you choose to convert all of them.
How does search and redact work?
The tool reads the text layer of each page with pdf.js, finds your word, phrase or regular expression, and works out where each match sits on the page from the position and width of the text. It then proposes a box for every match, shown in a list and outlined on the pages. Boxes are made slightly larger than the text so no edge of a letter is left visible. You choose which matches to keep before they become boxes, and you can still move or resize them.
What do the presets look for?
Email addresses, phone numbers written in international format (starting with + or 00 and a country code), IBAN-style strings (two letters, two check digits and groups of letters and numbers) and card-like numbers of 13 to 19 digits, with or without spaces or dashes. They are deliberately broad and do not validate checksums, so they may catch other long numbers too. Always review the matches, and search for names and addresses yourself.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
Yes, but only with boxes you draw. A scan has no text layer, so search cannot find anything. Draw rectangles over the parts you want removed and export as usual: the scanned image is re-rendered with the boxes painted in, so the covered pixels are replaced, not overlaid.
What else is removed from the file?
The output is built as a new PDF, so document information (title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer, dates), XMP metadata, bookmarks, attachments, form fields, document JavaScript and open actions are all left behind. On pages that are copied without boxes, only plain web links are kept, other annotations and page scripts are dropped.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The file is opened, previewed, searched and rebuilt entirely in your browser with pdf.js and pdf-lib. Nothing is sent to a server, which matters when the whole point is to keep the information private.

About Redact PDF

You can mark areas in two ways. Drag rectangles directly on the page previews with a mouse or a finger, then move them, resize them from the corners or delete them. Or search the document for a word, a phrase or a regular expression and let the tool place boxes over every match, with presets for email addresses, international phone numbers, IBAN-style account numbers and long card-like digit groups. Search results are shown as a list with the surrounding text and as outlines on the pages, so you can untick false positives before they become boxes. Search only works where the PDF has real text: for scanned pages, draw the boxes by hand.

When you export, each page that has at least one box is rendered to an image at 150, 200 or 300 dpi, the boxes are painted onto that image, and the page is stored in a new PDF as that picture only, with no text layer, fonts, annotations or form fields from the original. Pages without boxes are copied as they are, keeping their selectable text and web links, or you can convert every page for maximum safety. The output is a fresh document, so the title, author, dates, XMP metadata, attachments, form data and embedded scripts of the original are not carried over. Afterwards the tool opens the result the same way any PDF reader would and tells you whether any text can still be found on redacted pages. Everything happens in your browser and the file is never uploaded.

Redaction failures that made the news

In 2005 the US military published a report on the shooting of an Italian intelligence officer in Iraq with classified passages covered by black boxes. Readers simply copied the text out of the PDF, and the hidden names and procedures were in Italian newspapers within a day. The same mistake has been repeated many times since, including court filings in the Paul Manafort case in 2019, where journalists recovered blacked-out passages by selecting and pasting the text.

The word redaction itself is older than any of this. It comes from the Latin redigere, to bring back or reduce, and for centuries it meant editing or preparing a text for publication, a meaning it still has in several European languages, where a redaktion or rédaction is an editorial office. The sense of blanking out sensitive parts grew up in twentieth century government and legal practice, when censors worked on paper with black markers and razor blades.

On paper, a thick marker line really does destroy the information, at least on the copy that is photocopied and released. Digital documents broke that assumption, because what you see on screen is only a rendering of the data in the file. That is why proper digital redaction means deleting or flattening the content rather than hiding it.

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