Redact PDF
Remove text and pictures from a document so that they are gone from the file.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Drop a PDF above and its pages appear here.
Redact the file
Add a file to get started.
Options
Text to remove wherever it appears in the document.
The colour of the box drawn where the content was.
Advanced
How far past the text to remove, so that no part of a letter is left behind.
What will be removed
An area drawn here is a promise about the file you get back, not a picture of it. What is under it comes out of the document — the text, the pictures, and the tagging that restates them — and a box is drawn where it was. The page you are looking at stays as it is.
No pages yet
Drop a PDF above and its pages appear here.
Drag across the page to draw an area. With the keyboard: Tab to an area, then the arrow keys move it, Shift and an arrow key moves it further, Control (or Command) and an arrow key changes its size, and Delete removes it.
What this does
Redaction removes content from the file so that it cannot be recovered: the text objects, the pictures and the metadata, not a black rectangle drawn on top of them. It is not finished until it has been proved — the words are searched for again in the file that was written, and a run that finds one still there fails rather than hand you a document that looks redacted and is not.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- A scanned page holds a picture of words, and nothing here can read it. Run OCR over it first, or give the area as a rectangle.
- A rectangle that reaches into a word takes the rest of that word — up to eight letters of it, or two where the file does not say which of its codes is a space — because the rectangle a search works out is right to within a letter rather than to the glyph, and half a name left on the page is worse than a whole one removed.
- Text that is not upright on the page — a rotated watermark, a sideways heading — is removed a run at a time rather than a letter at a time, because a reader reports no position inside a turned run.
- Text is searched over the whole document. Redacting a name on one page and leaving it on the next is not something this tool will do; to clear part of a page and nothing else, give the area as a rectangle.
- Drawings are not removed: a chart or a signature under a rectangle is covered by the box rather than taken out of the file. Text and pictures are.
- A picture stored as a fax, a JBIG2 scan or a JPEG 2000 cannot be edited by this build, so one lying under a rectangle is removed whole rather than in part.
- What the document no longer refers to is dropped, so a file that had been saved incrementally comes back without its earlier versions.
- The title, the author and every other document detail are removed, because they routinely restate what was redacted.
- An annotation or a form field whose own text is what is being removed is deleted wherever on the page it sits, not only where it lies under a rectangle: a value a reader hands back on demand is a copy of the thing that was redacted.
- A bookmark, a file attached to the document or a named destination is left as it was. What is cleared is the page content, the annotations over it, the tagging that described it and the document details.
- A protected document is written back out in the clear. Protect it again if it needs a password.
Questions people ask
How is this different from drawing a black box over the text?
Completely. A black box is a drawing with the text still underneath it, which anybody can select, copy or delete the box from — this is how redaction failures make the news. This takes the text out of the file.
How do I know it worked?
Because it checks. After writing the file, the terms are searched for again in what was written; if any survives, the run fails and you get an error rather than a document you would have trusted.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.