Redact a PDF withouthanding it to anyone

Drop the file on the upload card. Every page is drawn on screen, and your cursor becomes a crosshair. Drag a box over anything that should not be readable, on as many pages as you need. Hover a box and click the red circle to take it off again.

Click Apply & Download when the boxes are where you want them. The redacted copy downloads with -redacted in the name, and your original stays on your device untouched.

Here it does, and it is worth being exact about how. On the pages you boxed, the tool redraws the page as a picture, paints solid black over the boxed areas of that picture, and puts the flattened picture into the new file in place of the old page.

A page rebuilt that way holds no text objects at all. The characters that were under the box were never written into the new file, so copy, search, text extraction, and a raw scan of the file bytes all come back with nothing. That is what makes this different from drawing a rectangle over the words.

In most editors, and in most online tools, a black box is just a shape sitting above the text. The words are still in the page data underneath. Select across the box and paste, or run any extraction tool, and they come straight back out.

Court filings and government reports have leaked names exactly this way. If you have ever covered something with a black rectangle in a word processor and printed to PDF, assume the text is still there.

Nothing at all. Pages without a box are copied into the new file exactly as they were, so their text stays selectable and searchable and the file does not balloon. The rebuild cost is paid only on the pages you actually redacted.

That is the trade for real removal. On a page you boxed, all the other text on that page also stops being selectable, because the whole page is now a picture. It is redrawn at roughly 216 dots per inch, which looks the same as the original at normal zoom, and it makes the file bigger.

So redact last. Do the editing, signing, and page shuffling first, and treat the redacted download as the copy you hand out rather than the one you keep working on.

The tool has no idea what your document says. It removes the rectangles you drew and nothing else, so the checking is yours to do.

The same name or number often appears in a header, a footer, a signature block, a table of contents, and again in an appendix. Walk the whole document before you apply, and draw each box a little wider than the words so no sliver of a letter survives at the edge.

Open the download and try to break it. Select across a black box and paste somewhere. Press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F and search for the word you removed. Nothing should come back. This takes ten seconds and it is the only proof that matters.

Landlords, lenders, accountants, and visa offices ask for statements constantly. They need the transactions, not your full account number. Box the account digits, the customer ID, and anything else that is nobody's business, apply, and send the rebuilt copy on.

Pleadings, exhibits, discovery sets, and settlement papers usually need names, addresses, details about minors, and case identifiers taken out before they move on. A cosmetic box will not do, since anyone receiving the file can pull the text back. Box each item, apply, file the rebuilt copy, and keep your original as the unredacted record.

Referral letters, lab results, and insurance correspondence carry names, dates of birth, and policy numbers that the next reader has no need to see. Because the work happens on your own computer, the record is never in a stranger's hands while you do it.

Scans work the same way, since the pages are already pictures and the black is painted straight onto the pixels. One thing to watch: if the scan was made searchable earlier, that text layer is part of the page and is dropped when the page is rebuilt, which is what you want under the box.

A locked file cannot be read until the password comes off, so the upload will not open it. Remove the password first, redact the plain copy, and lock the result again if it needs to travel protected.

The download is a fresh document rather than an edited copy of the old one, which is what keeps the removed text out of it. The side effect is that document-level extras do not always survive: bookmarks, interactive form fields, and files attached to the PDF may be missing or no longer clickable. Open the result and check if your document relies on them.

Redaction takes the words out of the file. A password decides who can open it at all. For something like a medical record or a settlement, doing both is reasonable: redact first, then encrypt the finished copy.

It runs in a mobile browser, so there is nothing to install. Drawing a box with a fingertip is coarser than with a mouse, so zoom in, draw generously, and check the download before you send it.