Redact PDF Online

Permanently hide sensitive content in a PDF

Black bars added in a normal PDF editor often only sit on top of the text, so the original words can still be copied, searched or recovered underneath. This redact PDF tool avoids that trap. It renders each page to a canvas, lets you draw solid black rectangles over the areas you want to hide, and then rebuilds a brand-new PDF from those flattened page images. The hidden content is not covered — it is gone, because the new file contains only the redacted picture of each page with no text layer beneath it.

Everything runs in your browser. pdfjs-dist draws the pages locally, you mark the regions, and pdf-lib assembles the redacted images into a downloadable PDF. Nothing is uploaded, which is essential when you are removing names, account numbers, addresses, signatures or other private details from contracts, statements, medical records and legal documents before sharing them.

How to redact carefully

Drag across each piece of text or image you want to remove; you can add several boxes on a page and use undo or clear if you make a mistake. Make the boxes a little larger than the text so no edges peek out, and remember to scroll through every page, because sensitive data can appear in headers, footers and margins as well as the body. When you build the file, the tool burns the boxes into the page images so the result is consistent in every PDF viewer.

What to expect from the output

Because each page becomes an image, the redacted PDF no longer has selectable or searchable text and may be larger than the original. That is the trade-off that makes the redaction trustworthy. Keep your original document as a backup, then open the redacted download and try to select or search for the hidden words to confirm they cannot be recovered before you send the file to anyone else.