Tool · runs in your browser
Black out sensitive info in a PDF —
permanently, in your browser.
Draw black boxes over anything private — SSNs, bank and card numbers, addresses, signatures — and download a redacted copy. The boxes are burned into each page and the text underneath is destroyed, so it can never be copied or recovered. Your file is never uploaded, which makes it safe for the most sensitive documents.
Loading redactor…
Frequently asked questions
- Is the redaction permanent, or can the black boxes be removed?
- It's permanent. Most 'free' redactors just draw a black rectangle on top of the live text — anyone can select or copy the text underneath, so it's not really redacted. This tool works differently: it rasterises each page to an image, burns the black boxes into the pixels, and rebuilds the PDF so every page is a flattened image with no text layer at all. There is nothing under a box but black pixels, so the hidden content can't be selected, copied, searched, or recovered.
- Does my PDF get uploaded to a server?
- No. Your PDF never leaves your device. It's opened, rendered, and rebuilt entirely in your browser using a self-hosted build of Mozilla's pdf.js and the pdf-lib library — nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged. Once the page has loaded it even works offline, which makes it safe for the most sensitive documents. You can confirm it in your browser's Network tab: no requests go out while you redact.
- How do I know the blacked-out text is really gone?
- Open the redacted PDF you download and try to select or search for the hidden text — there's none to find, because every page is now an image with no text layer. If you copy the whole document (Ctrl/Cmd+A, then copy) you'll get nothing, and a text extractor will return an empty result. That's the point: the original text, fonts, and metadata are dropped, and only the flattened picture — with your black boxes painted in — remains.
- Does it work on scanned PDFs and photos of documents?
- Yes. Because the tool rasterises every page, it treats a scanned or photographed page exactly like a digital one — you draw boxes over the sensitive areas and they're burned into the image. It handles the compressed image formats scanners use (including JBIG2 and JPEG2000), all decoded in your browser.
- Can I redact more than one page or place several boxes?
- Yes. Multi-page PDFs are fully supported — page through the document with the arrows and add as many boxes as you need on any page. Every page is flattened on export, so even pages you didn't touch come out with no selectable text, and every box you drew is permanently applied.
- Does it work on my phone?
- Yes. It runs in any modern browser on Android and iPhone as well as on Windows, Mac, and Linux — there's no app to install. On a touchscreen, drag one finger across the page to draw a box; precise boxes are easiest with a mouse, so a desktop or laptop is handy for detailed work.