This tool permanently destroys sensitive content in a PDF — free, in your browser, and the document is never uploaded anywhere. Unlike highlighting or covering text with a white box, true redaction ensures the original content cannot be recovered: not by selecting text, not by editing the PDF, not by any means. Our tool does this by rasterizing pages and physically replacing the marked areas with black rectangles at the pixel level.

When to use redaction

Redaction is appropriate when you need to share a document but must remove specific information before doing so. Common scenarios include:

• Legal filings. Court documents often require redaction of personal identifiers — Social Security numbers, addresses, financial account numbers, names of minors.
• FOIA and public records requests. Government agencies redact classified, privileged, or personally identifiable information before releasing documents.
• Contract sharing. When sharing a contract template or example, you may need to remove pricing, party names, or confidential terms.
• Medical records. HIPAA requires that protected health information be removed before sharing records for research or secondary purposes.
• Internal reports. Before circulating a report outside your team, you might need to remove employee names, salary figures, or strategic details.

How our redaction works

Many PDF tools claim to redact content but only place a black rectangle on top of the text. The text is still there — hidden visually but trivially extractable by anyone who knows how to select text or open the file in an editor. This is not redaction. It is decoration.

Our tool uses a fundamentally different approach:

1. Rasterize. Each page that contains redaction areas is rendered to a bitmap image at your chosen DPI using the PDF.js rendering engine. This converts all text, vectors, and images on the page into pixels.
2. Black out. Black rectangles are drawn directly onto the bitmap at the coordinates you specified. The original text is now overwritten at the pixel level.
3. Re-embed. The modified bitmap is embedded into a new PDF page with the same dimensions as the original. The result is a page that looks identical to the original except that the redacted areas are solid black.
4. Preserve unaffected pages. Pages with no redaction areas are copied directly from the source document without rasterization, preserving their text, links, and interactivity.

This approach guarantees that the redacted content is gone. There is no hidden layer, no invisible text, no recoverable data. The tradeoff is that redacted pages become images — they lose searchable text and interactive elements. For most redaction use cases, this is an acceptable and expected tradeoff.

Tips for effective redaction

Be thorough. Check every page for the information you want to remove. Sensitive data often appears in headers, footers, watermarks, and metadata — not just the main body text. Consider running the file through our Metadata Viewer tool as well to strip hidden document properties.

Use the right DPI. If you only need the redacted document for on-screen viewing, 150 DPI keeps file sizes small. For print, use 300 DPI. Higher DPI does not improve the security of the redaction — it only affects the visual quality of the output.

Verify the result. After downloading the redacted file, open it and try to select or search for the text you redacted. You should find that the redacted areas contain no selectable text. This is the simplest way to confirm that the redaction worked.

Keep the original. Redaction is irreversible. Always save a copy of the unredacted document in case you need it later.