How do you use this tool?
- Choose one PDF up to 200 MB, or load the example.
- Select a page and drag a rectangle over sensitive content. You can also enter its position and size in points.
- Check every box, then choose Redact.
- Read the result warnings and download the redacted PDF.
How do you remove confidential text from a PDF?
An account number on a contract, a private address on a letter, or individual transactions on a statement may need to disappear before you share a document. Open one PDF and draw a box over each sensitive area on the page. The preview shows your selections as dark overlays. Clicking Redact creates the downloadable version. Your original file on the device is kept, so you can return to it if you chose the wrong area.
A black rectangle alone does not remove PDF text. The words underneath can still appear in searches or when someone copies the page. This tool removes affected characters from the page content and then paints an opaque black rectangle to make the gap visible. Text outside the selected words remains usable. Export does not turn the whole page into an image, so surrounding text can still be selected and copied.
What else can a selection remove?
A word that a box only clips is removed in full. Even touching its first or last letter can remove the entire word, so leave space around neighbouring words you intend to retain. A stroke crossing the box is also removed entirely, including the section outside your selection. Filled shapes fully inside the box are removed. A table border can therefore disappear beyond the edge of the visible black rectangle.
Intersecting annotations are deleted with their comment contents. Removed text is also replaced where it occurs in document information and outline titles. Additional metadata is edited when it can safely be read as text; otherwise a warning appears with the result. If page content cannot be decoded or removed reliably, processing stops without generating a download. It does not release a partially redacted copy.
Why do scanned pages need extra care?
A scan is pixels. A black box does not remove words from an image. Words that exist only in an image are still there. When a selection intersects an embedded image, the image object remains in the output and receives a visible cover. Read the warning beside the download. A searchable scan may contain both an image and a separate text layer; deleting that text does not erase the photographed words.
How should you check the downloaded file?
Open the result again, search for sensitive words and try copying the selected passages. Check adjacent text, comments, document properties and every affected page as well. These checks do not establish that a court will consider the file sufficiently redacted. Follow the recipient’s requirements. To prepare the rest of your document, use PDF Merger or Reorder PDF Pages.
For technical background on document structure, see the PDF format specification and the format specification archive. These describe the format; they do not approve your particular file for legal use.