PDF Tool
Redact PDF
Permanently remove sensitive text or areas from a PDF. Redacted content cannot be recovered.
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Drag a PDF here, or click to browse
Single file · Max 100.0 MB
How it works
- 1
Upload the PDF.
- 2
Click and drag on the page to draw a black box over anything you want permanently removed.
- 3
Repeat on any page you need to redact.
- 4
Click Apply to export — every page is rebuilt from scratch with the redacted content genuinely gone.
Redact PDF — frequently asked questions
- Is this real redaction, or just a black box drawn on top of the text?
- Real redaction. Many tools only draw a black rectangle over text while leaving the original text underneath fully intact and extractable — copy-pasting the 'redacted' area, or opening the file in another tool, would recover it completely. This tool rebuilds every page as a flattened image, so the underlying text is genuinely deleted, not hidden. There is no way to recover a redacted area from the output file.
- Does this affect pages I didn't redact?
- Yes, deliberately. Every page in the output is rebuilt as an image, including pages with no redaction on them at all, and text elsewhere on the page becomes non-selectable too. This is the tradeoff for a genuine guarantee that redacted content can't be recovered — a tool that preserved selectable text everywhere except the redacted box would still carry that same fake-redaction risk within the box itself.
- Will the output file look different — lower quality, bigger file size?
- Pages are rendered at high resolution before export, so text and images should look sharp at normal zoom levels. The file will typically be larger than the original, since every page is now an image rather than structured text and vector content — a reasonable tradeoff for permanent, genuine removal.
- Can I redact a password-protected PDF?
- Not directly — unlock it first with the Unlock PDF tool (which needs the correct password), then redact the unlocked file.