Redact PDF (Free — Black Out Text, No Upload)
Free tool to redact (black out) names, addresses, account numbers, and other sensitive text in a PDF by dragging over the areas you want to hide. Each page is rebuilt as an image, so the original text cannot be recovered. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
What is PDF redaction?
This tool lets you black out names, addresses, account numbers, confidential notes, or any other sensitive text in a PDF simply by dragging over the areas you want to hide, then downloading the result. It is useful before sharing contracts, invoices, or screenshots that contain information you would rather keep private.
A common but risky shortcut is to just draw a black rectangle over the sensitive text without removing anything underneath. That "cosmetic" redaction leaves the original text data inside the PDF, where it can leak through copy-paste or a text search — a well-known vulnerability. This tool instead rebuilds each redacted page as a flat image, so the original text and graphics are physically removed and cannot be recovered afterward.
How to redact a PDF
- Choose a PDF Drag and drop a file into the box, or click it to pick a file from your device.
- Drag over what you want to hide On the page shown, drag with your mouse or finger over any area to add a black box there.
- Check the other pages Use "Next" to move through the document and repeat the same steps on any other page that needs it.
- Review your marks Remove a single box with the × in its corner, or clear an entire page with "Clear redactions on this page".
- Generate and download Click "Generate redacted PDF" to process the file; a download button appears once it finishes.
Tips for getting more out of it
- Even a partially visible word can sometimes be guessed. Draw each box a little larger than the text itself, including the surrounding margin.
- This works just as well on scanned paper documents or screenshots that never had selectable text to begin with — the tool always works from the rendered page image.
- Because the whole page becomes an image, the resulting PDF is no longer searchable or selectable, even outside the redacted areas. Reorder or remove unrelated pages first with the PDF page organizer if you only need to redact part of a large document.
- Larger documents take longer to generate — keep the tab open while it processes.
- The original file is never modified. Share only the downloaded redacted copy and keep the source file to yourself.
When to use PDF redaction
Sharing a contract or quote
Black out a client's bank details or unit pricing before sending a document outside your company.
Publishing a doc with screenshots
Hide an email address or account name that appears in a captured screenshot embedded in a report.
Submitting a personal document
Redact part of an ID number or account number in paperwork before handing it in for an application.
Reusing real data for training or a blog post
Anonymize a document built from actual customer names or sales figures before using it internally or publicly.
PDF redaction glossary
- Redaction
- The process of removing or obscuring part of a document so it can no longer be read, typically to protect confidential or personal information before sharing it.
- Rasterization
- Converting vector data such as text and shapes into a grid of pixels — an image. This tool rasterizes each page so the original text data is replaced with pixel data.
- Text layer
- The layer of a PDF that holds selectable, searchable character data. A black box drawn on top does not touch this layer, which is exactly why cosmetic redaction can leak information.
- Cosmetic redaction
- Simply placing a black shape over sensitive content without deleting the underlying data. Because the original text remains inside the file, it can still be extracted by copy-paste or a text search.
- PII (personally identifiable information)
- Information that can identify a specific person, such as a name, address, or ID number. Redaction tools are commonly used to remove PII before a document is submitted or published.
Frequently asked questions
Side Note — Why "cosmetic" black boxes keep leaking secrets
Stories about redacted documents that were not actually redacted keep resurfacing. Government disclosures, corporate reports, and court filings have all been caught with black boxes that could be undone with nothing more than a copy-paste or a search-box query, exposing the very text they were meant to hide.
The root cause sits in how a PDF page is built. Every letter and shape on a page is stored as its own positioned object inside the file. Drawing a black rectangle on top simply adds one more object to that list — it does not touch, let alone delete, the text objects sitting underneath. Visually the text disappears, but as data it is all still there, waiting to be read.
The reliable fix is to flatten the whole page into a single image before anything else. An image has no concept of a "text object" at all — it is just a grid of colored pixels — so there is no longer any structured data to pull out from underneath a black box. That is exactly why this tool rebuilds every page as an image each time a redaction is applied.
One limitation is worth keeping in mind: information that never appears on the visible page, such as the author name in the file's properties, its revision history, or an embedded attachment, is untouched by this process. For truly sensitive documents, it is worth checking and clearing that metadata separately in addition to the visual redactions.