What this tool does
Redact PDF lets you permanently remove sensitive content from a PDF — names, account numbers, signatures, photos, anything you don't want a recipient to see. Unlike drawing a black rectangle over content in a generic PDF editor (which leaves the underlying text intact so it can be copied out later), this tool actually destroys the redacted content in the output PDF.
How the redaction works (the important part)
A common mistake with DIY PDF redaction is to draw a black box on top of text using a generic editor. The text is still there — a recipient can select it, copy it out, or run a text-extraction tool and see the supposedly-redacted content. There have been real-world data leaks caused by this.
Our tool avoids that failure mode:
- You mark rectangles on pages to redact.
- When you click Process, each redacted page is rendered to an image at 2× resolution, the black rectangles are drawn onto that image, and the flattened image is embedded back into a new PDF as a replacement for the page.
- Unredacted pages are copied verbatim (byte-for-byte) using
pdf-lib's
copyPages, so their text, fonts and vectors stay intact at original quality.
The result: on any page you redacted, the content under the black bars is truly gone — it's no longer a text run sitting behind an opaque overlay; it's just pixels that happen to be black. A copy-paste or text-extract on that page will return nothing where the black bar is.
Input limits
- Single file per redaction session
- No hard file-size cap — limited by your browser's available memory because everything runs client-side. Typical laptops handle a few hundred pages without issue.
What this tool is and isn't
- Is a true content-destroying redaction, equivalent in security to printing the page, drawing over the sensitive areas with a black marker, and scanning the result.
- Isn't a compliance-certified redaction tool for regulated industries. If you need an audit trail of redactions, assigned redaction types (PII / PHI), or reviewer sign-off, use a dedicated enterprise tool (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Pro's Redact feature, iRedact, etc.).
What redacted pages will look like
Because redacted pages become images rather than vector text:
- Sharpness — text on redacted pages is rendered at 2× scale and re-compressed as JPEG quality 85. At normal reading zoom it's visually indistinguishable from the original.
- File size — redacted pages add some size (each becomes a JPEG); unredacted pages don't. The output is usually a bit larger than the original if you redacted many pages, and about the same if you redacted only a few.
- Text selection — on redacted pages, text cannot be selected (it's now a picture). Unredacted pages still allow selection as normal.
Privacy and file handling
Redact PDF is a pure in-browser tool. Your PDF, the redactions you draw, and the output file all live only in your browser's memory. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on our server, and nothing is logged beyond the standard request for the static HTML page.