Redact a PDF
Drag a black bar over names, addresses, account numbers, works offline, — anything sensitive. The hidden text is permanently destroyed, not just covered. 100% in your browser.
Drop a PDF file here
or click to choose from your device
Choose a PDFHow to redact a PDF
- Drop your PDF or click to choose it.
- Click and drag on the page to draw a black box over anything you want to hide.
- Optionally use Find & redact text to black out every match of a string at once.
- Use the page nav to redact other pages — or click ✕ on any box to remove it.
- Click Apply redactions & download. The redacted pages are flattened to images so the hidden text can't be recovered.
What real redaction means
Redaction is the deliberate, permanent removal of specific information from a document — names, addresses, account numbers, medical details — so the document can be shared without exposing that information. The distinction that matters: covering text with a black rectangle is not redaction. The text is still there, behind the rectangle, recoverable by anyone who knows how to look.
This is not a hypothetical concern. There is a long history of major institutions — newspapers, law firms, intelligence agencies, government departments — publishing "redacted" PDFs where the hidden text could be retrieved with three clicks: open the PDF, select-all, copy, paste into a text editor. The redactions were just opaque rectangles laid over the page, with the original characters still encoded in the underlying file.
PDFtez's Redact tool performs real redaction. When you apply redactions, the affected pages are rendered to high-resolution images and rebuilt — the original text is genuinely gone, not just hidden. There is no text layer to select, no encoded character data to recover. A select-all on a redacted page returns nothing for the redacted areas because there is literally nothing there.
When to use Redact PDF
Use real redaction whenever a third party will read the file and the hidden text could matter:
- Sharing financial documents. Bank statements, payslips, tax returns — black out account numbers, BSB/routing details, and balances before sending to a real-estate agent, accountant, or insurer.
- Submitting court documents or FOI responses. Anywhere case-by-case redaction is legally required (witness names, victim addresses, exempt material), real redaction is mandatory; cover-rectangle "redaction" can amount to a privacy breach.
- Publishing case studies and reports. Customer success stories often need anonymisation. Remove the client name and identifying details before publication so the file can be hosted publicly.
- Sharing medical records. When sending a referral or claim form, redact the patient's full name, date of birth, and Medicare/insurance numbers if the recipient doesn't need them.
- Job application proof. Sending payslips or contracts as proof of income? Redact the employer's clients, project names, and salary details that exceed what's being asked for.
- Releasing internal documents. Internal reports that need to go to clients or external reviewers often include names, internal codenames, or commercial terms that shouldn't leak — redact them before share.
How PDFtez redacts your PDFs (under the hood)
PDFtez's Redact tool runs entirely inside your browser. The interactive part uses PDF.js to render each page so you can drag black boxes over the content you want gone. Find & redact text works on PDFs with selectable text: PDFtez walks the page's text positions, locates each match for your query, and adds a redaction box at the exact glyph coordinates.
The destructive part runs when you click Apply redactions & download. For each page that has redactions, PDFtez:
- Renders the page (with the black rectangles overlaid) to a high-resolution image — typically at 2× the on-screen resolution to preserve sharpness for print.
- Discards the original page entirely.
- Inserts a new page containing only the rasterised image of what should remain visible.
Because the new page is an image, there is no text layer to select, no encoded characters to recover, and no metadata referencing the original text. pdf-lib assembles the rebuilt PDF in memory and triggers a local download. No upload, no server, no logging.
The side effect: redacted pages lose their searchable text layer for the parts that were redacted. Untouched pages stay fully searchable.
How is PDFtez Redact different from other redactors?
There are two kinds of "redact" feature in online PDF tools. The first kind draws a black rectangle on top of the page and saves the PDF — the underlying text is still there, recoverable with copy-paste. Many "free" online redactors do this without warning. Avoid these for anything you actually care about.
The second kind, including Adobe Acrobat Pro's redact feature, genuinely destroys the underlying text. PDFtez belongs to this second category — and does it on your device, without uploading the document being redacted to a third-party server. For sensitive material, that combination (real redaction + no upload) is the only sensible workflow.
Frequently asked questions
Is PDFtez's redaction actually irreversible?
Yes for the pages you redact. Those pages are replaced with rasterised images that contain only the visible content. There is no text layer underneath, no hidden character data, and no way to "select" the redacted areas to recover what was there. You can verify this by opening the saved PDF in any text-extraction tool and confirming the redacted areas return nothing. Unmodified pages keep their original text layer.
Why do redacted pages lose searchability?
Because real redaction requires removing the underlying text — and the simplest way to do that is to replace the page with an image of itself with the bad parts blacked out. Once the text is gone, search has nothing to match against. The cost of guaranteed privacy is a (per-page) loss of searchability. If you only redact a few pages of a long document, the other pages remain searchable as normal.
Will the redacted PDF look the same when printed?
Yes. PDFtez renders redacted pages at high resolution (typically 2× screen DPI) so they print sharply. To a normal reader the redacted file is indistinguishable from a non-redacted one except where the black bars sit.
How does "Find & redact text" work?
For PDFs with a selectable text layer, PDFtez looks up the exact glyph positions of every match for your query string and creates a redaction box at each location. Matches that span a line break can occasionally be missed (because the underlying coordinates split too) — always preview the page before clicking Apply. The feature is labelled "beta" for this reason.
Can I redact a scanned PDF (no text layer)?
Yes — the drag-to-redact workflow works on any PDF, including scans. Find & redact text needs a text layer to search, so it doesn't work on pure scans; for those, redact visually by dragging black boxes.
Where do my files go? Are they uploaded?
Your files stay on your device. Both the visual redaction and the destructive flatten-to-image step run entirely in your browser. No file data is uploaded to any server, no copy is stored, and nothing is logged. You can verify this in DevTools → Network while you redact.