Redact PDF

Redact PDF blacks out the areas you mark and rebuilds every page as an image, so the text under the black is gone rather than merely covered.

Each page is rendered to a canvas, your rectangles are painted solid black onto those pixels, and the document is reassembled from the resulting JPEGs. That is what makes the redaction real: no text layer survives anywhere in the output, so nothing can be selected, searched or recovered from beneath the marks — which is precisely how a black box drawn in a word processor fails. The cost is paid by the whole document rather than the redacted part alone: no text in the file is selectable or searchable afterwards, and the result is usually larger than the original.

The rendering and the blacking out both happen on your device, so the unredacted document never leaves it.

Removing an account number before a statement goes to an accountant, taking names out of a document for a records request, hiding salary figures in a contract before it circulates, and preparing an exhibit for filing.

Also known as: blackout text in pdf · redact ssn from pdf · permanent redaction · censor pdf text