How is this different from cropping or hiding?

Redaction actually removes the underlying content from the file. Crop and watermark only hide it visually — anyone with a PDF editor can reveal it. Redaction is irreversible.

Can I redact images, or just text?

Both. You can draw redaction rectangles over any region; if the region contains text, the text is removed; if it contains images, the image area is filled black.

Will the redacted text really be gone?

Yes. We rewrite the page content stream, removing the marked text objects entirely. The file is then re-saved without them.

PDF

Redact PDF

Black out text and image regions in a PDF so the underlying content is truly gone — not just hidden, but removed from the file. Use for legal, medical or financial documents before sharing.

On the way

Redact PDF is coming soon

Black out text and image regions in a PDF so the underlying content is truly gone — not just hidden, but removed from the file. Use for legal, medical or financial documents before sharing.

We're still building this one. We'd rather not ship it until it works reliably end-to-end — no fake progress bars, no pretend success screens.

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Going deeper

The difference between hiding and removing

Hiding content in a PDF is easy; removing it is hard. Most 'redaction' tools just draw a black rectangle over the content, but the underlying text is still in the file — anyone who selects the area, copies it, or parses the PDF directly will see the supposedly redacted text. That's how major organizations have leaked sensitive information through PDFs they thought were redacted.

True redaction rewrites the page content stream and physically removes the text objects. There's no way to recover the redacted content from the resulting file — it's not in the file. This is the only safe way to share a PDF that previously contained sensitive information.

When this tool ships, it'll handle both rectangle-based redaction (drag over a region, content goes) and search-based redaction (type 'Social Security Number' or a specific name, every match is redacted). Both produce a clean file with no trace of the removed content.

What you get

Features

Drag to draw redaction regions on any page
True content removal (not just hidden)
Search-and-redact by text match
Coming soon

Step by step

How to use

1
Upload the PDF.
2
Drag rectangles over content to redact.
3
Optionally search for a term and redact all matches.
4
Click Apply and download the redacted PDF.

Your privacy

How this tool handles your file

When this tool ships, your PDF will be processed in a per-request temp directory and deleted immediately afterwards. The redacted output contains no trace of the removed content.

Frequently asked