Draw black boxes over anything private and download a copy where that content genuinely no longer exists — redacted on your device, not on a server.
Drawing a black rectangle over text in an ordinary PDF editor hides nothing: the text is still in the file, selectable straight through the box with Ctrl+A or extractable by any parser. Exactly this mistake has exposed redacted names and figures in court filings and government releases, repeatedly, because the documents LOOKED redacted. Real redaction has to destroy the content underneath — which is what this tool does.
You draw boxes on rendered previews of the pages — click and drag over the account number, the salary line, the name. When you apply, every page carrying a box is re-rendered to pixels, the boxes are painted onto those pixels, and the page is rebuilt as an image. The covered text isn't hidden behind a rectangle; it was never carried into the output file at all. Pages without boxes are copied untouched, keeping their quality and selectable text.
The trade-off is stated rather than hidden: redacted pages become images, so text on those specific pages is no longer selectable. That's the price of certainty, and for the documents that need redaction it's the right one.
It would be absurd to upload a document to a stranger's server in order to remove its sensitive parts. Here the previews are rendered in your browser and the redaction is burned in by code on your machine — no copy of the document, redacted or not, is transmitted anywhere. One companion step worth taking: a PDF's hidden metadata can also carry names and dates, and the Remove Metadata tool on this site cleans that separately.
Yes. Redacted pages are rebuilt as rendered images with the boxes painted in — the underlying text is never written to the output file, so there's nothing to select, search, or extract.
No. The previews, the boxes, and the final rebuild all run in your browser. The file never touches a server — which is rather the point of a redaction tool.
Pages you drew boxes on become images, so their text is no longer selectable. Untouched pages are copied as-is and keep their text layer and quality.
Boxes are drawn per page — a repeated header or account number needs a box on each page where it appears. The previews make that a quick scroll-and-drag pass.
Yes — check the file's metadata, which can carry the author's name and edit history. The Remove Metadata from PDF tool on this site strips it, also locally.