Redact PDF — Black Out Sensitive Text and Images Visually

Redaction is the act of permanently hiding sensitive information in a document before sharing it — names, addresses, account numbers, signatures, faces, internal notes — without altering the rest of the file. Our Redact PDF tool gives you a visual way to do exactly that: drop your PDF, click and drag to draw black boxes over anything you want to hide, switch pages freely, and download a redacted PDF where everything you marked is permanently covered.

Each redaction box is drawn directly into the page content stream, so it becomes part of the page itself — not an overlay or annotation that can be dragged off in another viewer. The boxes render identically in Adobe Acrobat, Preview, Foxit, browser PDF viewers and on print. You can draw as many redactions as you like, across as many pages as you like, in a single pass; the rest of your document keeps its original text, images, fonts and layout untouched.

The tool offers black redaction (the legal/government standard) and white redaction (useful when you want the redacted area to look like blank space rather than a visible box). For maximum security on highly sensitive documents, we recommend running the redacted file through our OCR PDF tool afterwards — that rasterizes each page to pixels, which guarantees no underlying text can be recovered with any "copy text" trick. Your files are processed in memory in our serverless function and discarded the moment your download is returned. Nothing is stored, logged or watermarked.

This is the right tool for legal teams preparing FOIA-style document releases, HR sharing redacted offer letters, journalists protecting sources in leaked documents, healthcare staff removing PHI before sharing scans, and anyone who needs to share a PDF with parts of it visually hidden.