Black out names, numbers and whole clauses — and actually remove them. Each page is rebuilt with the bars burned into the pixels, so there is no text hiding underneath to be copied back out. It all happens in your browser.
Your files never leave this devicePDF · up to 150 pages · 100 MB · multi-page editing
Four steps, and nothing leaves your device.
Drag your PDF onto the editor, or click Browse. It's opened in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Drag a box over each name, number or clause you want gone. Move, resize or delete any box before you export.
Use the page strip to review each page. If the same detail sits in the same place throughout, draw it once and use Copy boxes to all pages.
Every page is rebuilt with the bars baked into the pixels, so the text underneath is gone rather than covered.
A PDF isn't a picture of a document — it's a list of instructions for drawing one. Draw a black rectangle over a name in a PDF editor and you haven't removed the name; you've added one more instruction that says "paint this area black", to be carried out after the one that says "write this name here". Both are still in the file. Select the area and copy it, run the file through a text extractor, or open it in a different viewer, and the words come back out intact.
This is the single most common way redactions fail, and it fails quietly: on screen the document looks perfectly redacted, so nobody notices until someone thinks to check. It has caught out courts, government departments and law firms often enough that "redacted PDF leaks its own text" is a recognised genre of story. The bar was never the problem — what was underneath it was.
Every page is rendered to a canvas, the black bars are composited into those pixels, and a new PDF is assembled from the finished images. The text layer isn't hidden or covered — it is simply never carried across into the file you download. There is no instruction left that would draw those words, and no object to peel a rectangle away from, because the page is no longer built out of text at all.
Rebuilding rather than editing has a useful side effect: the hidden parts of the original don't come along either. Document metadata, annotations and comments, attachments, and form-field values are all things a PDF can carry without showing you, and all things that have leaked from documents that looked clean. The copy you download has none of them.
Destroying the text layer destroys all of it, not just the parts under your bars. The redacted PDF is a stack of images: you can't select or search its text, a screen reader can't read it aloud, and it will usually be a larger file than the original. That is the cost of the guarantee, and there isn't a version of this that keeps both. If you need a searchable document, redact this one and keep it as the shareable copy — don't try to have it both ways in a single file.
And if nothing actually needs to be hidden — you just want the document to stop being editable, with its form fields locked and its annotations merged in — that's a different job with a cheaper answer. Flatten it instead, which can do that while leaving the text sharp and searchable.
One thing the tool can't do for you is decide what to cover. Check every page before you export, including headers, footers, page margins and anything that repeats — and remember that a document can identify someone through context as easily as through a name.
Not from a file redacted here. This tool doesn't draw a box over your text — it renders every page to an image with the blacked-out areas already burned into the pixels, then rebuilds the PDF from those images, and the original text layer is not carried across. There's nothing under the bar to select, copy or extract, because the page is no longer made of text. That's the difference between this and a black rectangle drawn in a PDF editor, where the words are still in the file and come straight back out with copy and paste.
No. The document is opened, rendered and rebuilt entirely in your browser. There's no upload endpoint to send it to. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network and the tool still works.
Because that's exactly what makes it safe. The whole page becomes an image, so no text remains anywhere in the document — not only under the bars. It's an honest trade: a redacted PDF you can still search is a redacted PDF that still contains its words.
Usually, yes. A page of text stored as text is very compact; the same page stored as an image is not. Standard quality renders at 150 DPI and suits most documents. High renders at 300 DPI and is sharper but larger — worth it if the result will be printed or zoomed into.
Yes, and a scan is the simplest case: the page is already an image, so nothing is lost by rebuilding it. Worth knowing that a scan often carries an invisible OCR text layer added by the scanner or by Acrobat — that text is searchable and copyable, and rebuilding the page removes it too.
Yes, if you know the password. You'll be asked for it when you open the file. It's used in your browser to unlock the document, so the password never leaves your device any more than the file does. The redacted copy is saved without a password.
Yes. Every page keeps its own boxes, and the page strip shows which pages you've marked. When the same detail appears in the same position throughout — a letterhead, a footer, an address block — draw it once and use Copy boxes to all pages, then check each page, because a box that fits page one may not fit page four.
The output is rebuilt from scratch, so it carries none of the original's hidden extras either: no document metadata, no annotations or comments, no attachments, and no form fields. The visible content stays where it was, at the same page size and orientation.
Related privacy tools: Flatten a PDF · Redact an image · Blur a face · Pixelate an image · Remove photo metadata
The same trap catches images too: why a bar drawn on top of something isn't the same as removing it.