About this tool
Black out confidential passages so the underlying text is genuinely gone, not merely hidden. Select areas on the page, or search for a word or pattern and redact every occurrence at once.
How to use this tool
- Load your PDF.
- Drag boxes over the content to remove, or use search-and-redact for names, numbers or email addresses.
- Click Apply redaction. The page is rebuilt with the content destroyed.
How it works
Applying a redaction rasterises the affected page and draws the black boxes into the resulting image. Because the page is rebuilt from pixels, the original characters no longer exist anywhere in the file — they cannot be recovered by selecting, copying or inspecting the PDF.
Drawing a black rectangle in a normal PDF editor only covers text — it stays in the file and can be copied straight out. That is how redaction failures make the news. This tool removes the content instead.