Black out names, numbers and other private details in a PDF. Draw boxes or search the text; the hidden text is removed from the file, not just covered.
Works in your browser. What you paste or upload is processed on your device.
Tap the box and pick the PDF, or drag it onto the page. The first page opens in the editor.
Type a name or number and press Find all, or use the quick buttons for emails, phone numbers and card numbers. A box is added over every match.
Drag on the page to cover signatures, photos or anything search missed. On a phone, turn on Draw boxes first, or use Add box.
Use the page thumbnails; a red badge shows how many boxes each page has. Move, resize or remove boxes as needed.
Press Redact and download. Marked pages are rebuilt with the text removed, and the redacted PDF downloads.
Redact PDF permanently removes private details from a PDF before you share it: names, addresses, account and ID numbers, email addresses, signatures or whole paragraphs. You mark what to remove by dragging boxes on the page, by adding a box and moving it with the keyboard, or by searching the text. Search finds every match of a word or phrase across all pages, with options for matching case and whole words, and quick buttons find email addresses, phone numbers and card-style numbers.
Drawing a black rectangle in a normal PDF editor only covers the text: anyone can still copy it or remove the rectangle. This tool does real redaction. Each page with a box is redrawn as an image with the boxes burned into the pixels, and the page's original text, fonts, drawings, comments and form-field values are deleted from the file. The tool also drops the document's tagged-text structure, which can hold a second copy of the words, and by default clears the title, author and other document properties. Pages without boxes are kept exactly as they were, with their text still selectable.
Limits: text on redacted pages can no longer be selected or searched, because those pages are now images. Text search needs a PDF with a text layer; for a scanned PDF, draw the boxes by hand. Search places boxes from the text positions in the file, so check each page before you download. Password-protected PDFs must have the password removed first.
Sharing a bank statement, payslip, contract or medical letter often means hiding some of it first, and covering text with a shape is a common way private data leaks. Redacting in your browser means the unredacted document is never uploaded anywhere, and the downloaded file contains only what you chose to leave visible.
Something else? Ask the team
It is removed. Every page with a box is rebuilt as an image with the boxes painted into it, and the page's original text, fonts and drawings are deleted from the file. Copying, searching or editing the downloaded PDF cannot bring the covered text back.
Yes. The PDF is opened and redacted inside your browser and is never uploaded to our servers. Our server only records that a run happened, to count the free daily use. Closing the tab clears everything.
To remove the hidden text for certain, each redacted page becomes a single image. Pages you did not mark keep their selectable text. If you need the remaining words on a redacted page to be searchable, run the result through OCR PDF.
Yes, by drawing boxes by hand. A scan is already a picture of the page, so text search finds nothing on it. Draw a box over each detail you want removed.
Open this page in Safari or Chrome and choose the PDF. Tap Draw boxes, then drag a finger over each area to cover it (with Draw boxes off, the page scrolls normally). Search and Add box work the same on a phone. The redacted PDF downloads to Files or Downloads.
It finds every match in the PDF's text layer, across all pages, and can ignore case. It cannot see text that is part of an image (logos, scans, signatures), and box positions come from the file's text positions, so look over each page before you download.
Form fields on redacted pages are deleted along with their values, and comments on those pages are removed. With Remove document properties ticked (the default), the title, author, subject, keywords and XMP metadata are cleared as well.
You get one free run of this tool per day. After that, each run costs 5 credits (5 US cents), which needs a free AI Rank Lab account. One run is one press of the main button.
Each one opens on its own page and works straight away, with no sign-up.
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