How to redact a PDF properly
- Add the PDF you want to redact. It is read on your device — nothing is uploaded.
- Use the Page selector to reach the page you want, then drag a box across anything that has to go. Add as many boxes as you like, on as many pages as you like.
- The boxes are drawn solid black on purpose: what you see on screen is what the finished page looks like. Click a box to take it off again, or use Undo last.
- Choose the quality for the redrawn pages. 200 dpi suits screen reading and most printing; 300 dpi is worth it for a page that will be printed at full size.
- Press Redact and rebuild, check the result, then press Save.
About this tool
Redacting a PDF means removing information from it, not covering the information up. The distinction sounds pedantic and is the entire subject. This tool removes it.
The common failure is easy to reproduce. Open a PDF in most editors, draw a filled black rectangle over a name, save the file, send it. The rectangle is a new object drawn on top; the name is still in the page's content stream underneath it, exactly as it was. Select the blacked-out area in any reader, copy, and paste into a text editor — the name comes straight back. Newspapers, law firms and government departments have all published documents this way, and the recovered text has made news more than once.
Here the rectangles you drag are not part of the output. They are instructions. Every page you mark is redrawn from scratch as an image, with the marked regions painted onto the same canvas before anything is encoded, and the original page — its text, its fonts, its vector artwork — is discarded rather than covered. Afterwards there is nothing underneath, because there is no underneath.
That has a real cost and it is worth stating plainly: a redacted page stops being selectable, searchable text and becomes a picture of itself. This is the same trade every honest redaction makes, and it is why the tool only does it to the pages you actually marked. Mark one page of a hundred-page report and the other ninety-nine are copied across object-for-object, keeping their text intact.
One thing this cannot do for you: judge what needs redacting. Text that is still visible somewhere else in the document, in a header, in an appendix, or in the file's own properties, is still there. When you are removing a name, it is worth also running the file through Remove PDF metadata, which strips the author and software fields that most PDFs carry without anyone putting them there.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the text really removed, or just covered?
- Really removed. Each marked page is re-drawn as an image with the regions painted out and the original page discarded, so there is no text object left underneath to select or copy. A rectangle drawn over live text — which is what most editors give you — leaves the text in the file.
- Can someone recover what I redacted?
- Not from the redacted pages. The content is not hidden behind anything; it is absent from the file. Do check that the same information does not also appear elsewhere in the document, because the tool only removes what you marked.
- Does the whole document become an image?
- No — only the pages you drew on. Every unmarked page is copied across untouched and keeps its selectable text, fonts and vector graphics.
- Why did my file get bigger?
- A redrawn page is stored as an image, which is usually larger than the text it replaced. If size matters, run the result through Compress PDF afterwards.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. The PDF is read, redrawn and rebuilt entirely inside this browser tab. The counter on the page shows file bytes uploaded and stays at zero throughout.