Free Online PDF Redact

About PDF Redact

A huge number of "redacted" documents circulating online have been redacted incorrectly — a black box drawn on top of text in a PDF editor, which looks hidden visually but leaves the original text still fully present and extractable underneath, recoverable by anyone who selects the text, copies it, or opens the file's raw structure. This has caused real, embarrassing information leaks. This tool is built specifically to avoid that failure mode.

You mark the areas to redact by dragging a box directly over the sensitive content on each page's preview — social security numbers, names, account details, or any other content that needs to disappear completely, not just visually. Multiple boxes can be marked per page, and boxes can be removed individually if you change your mind before finalizing.

The critical difference from a fake redaction: pages you mark are rendered to a bitmap image first, the black boxes are drawn directly into those pixels, and only then is a new PDF built from that flattened image. Because the black box is baked into the same pixel layer as the text it covers — rather than drawn as a separate object on top of untouched vector text — there is no underlying text data left anywhere in the output for anyone to extract, select, or recover. What you see is genuinely all that's there.

Pages with no marked redaction areas are copied through completely unchanged, preserving their original text-selectable, searchable content — only pages you actually mark get rasterized and lose text-selectability, which is the necessary and expected trade-off for those specific pages in exchange for a redaction that's actually secure.

How it works

1. Upload your PDF. Page previews are rendered for you to review.
2. Drag boxes over sensitive content. Mark every area that needs to be permanently blacked out, per page.
3. Redact and download. Marked areas are rasterized with black boxes baked into the pixels — permanently.