Redact a PDF permanently

A white or black box drawn over words hides them on screen but leaves them in the file — still selectable, still extractable. This removes the words under the box for good, so the file you send no longer contains them at all.

How it works

1. Add the PDFDrop the document. Pages are drawn one at a time so you can place each redaction where it belongs, and zoom in for fine work.
2. Draw a box over what must goDrag a rectangle over the text to remove. One page or many — each box is a promise that the text under it will not survive the save.
3. Save the redacted copyYou get a new file with the marked text gone and a black rectangle where it was. The original on disk is never changed, so you can try again.

Covering up is not redacting — and why it matters

Two things look the same on screen and are different in the file. A box drawn over text (white-out) paints a rectangle above the words: the words are still there, in the content stream, and anyone who selects the page, copies it, or searches for it will find them. That is fine for tidying a form, and completely wrong for an account number.

A redaction rewrites the page so that the words under the box are no longer in the file. The rectangle that remains is a statement that something was here and is now gone — on screen, in print, and when the page is parsed. If what you are marking truly must not travel, that is what you want.

What this affects — and what it leaves alone

A page that carries a redaction is rebuilt as a picture with the boxes burnt into its pixels, so the words under a box are not covered — they are simply not in the file any more. That is the difference that matters. It also has a cost worth stating plainly: that page loses its text layer, so the words elsewhere on the same page stop being selectable and searchable. Pages with no box are copied across untouched and keep their text and their quality.

One page cannot be half-redacted from the inside and keep the rest selectable: a single page carrying both something you need and something you do not needs a different move — split the document, keep the part you want, and delete the rest, or take the information out in the application that produced the document.

How to check the result before you send it

Open the redacted file and try to select or search for the words you marked — they should be missing entirely, and so is the rest of the text on that page, because it is now a picture. That is the trade: certainty in exchange for a text layer on the redacted pages.

Keep the original until the recipient has accepted the redacted copy. The tool writes a new file and never touches the original on disk, so the decision is reversible for exactly as long as you keep the file you started with.

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