Redact PDF

The redact tool permanently blacks out text, numbers, or images in a PDF by drawing a solid rectangle over them. Once the rectangles are applied, the covered areas are baked into the file and stay hidden in every viewer that opens it afterward. All rendering and editing happens locally in your browser, so the file never leaves your computer.

Why Redaction Matters

Sharing a PDF that contains a stray account number, a signature, a home address, or an internal note is a small leak with outsize consequences. People often try to cover such details with a quick box in a word processor, but that only hides them visually while the text underneath stays in the file. Redaction draws the black rectangle into the document itself, so the covered content no longer appears when the file is opened, printed, or exported. That distinction makes it the right choice whenever a document is about to leave your control, whether it is headed to a client, an agency, or a shared drive.

How to Redact a PDF

1. Upload or drag in the PDF. The pages render on screen so you can review exactly what you are covering.
2. Move through the document with the previous and next page controls.
3. Click and drag over each piece of content you want to hide; a black rectangle follows your cursor.
4. Use Undo Last if you place a box in the wrong spot.
5. Click Apply Redactions and Download once every page is covered.

A counter tracks how many areas you have marked so far, which helps before you finalize a document that needs dozens of small redactions. Nothing is written to the file until you choose to apply, so the whole marking stage stays reversible.

What You Can Hide

Anything visible on a page can be covered: names, email addresses, phone numbers, account and card numbers, national identification details, signatures, confidential figures, and faces in photos. You can place several rectangles on a single page and work through the document page by page. The boxes are drawn with the exact boundaries you set, so a narrow strip of text can be hidden without blacking out the whole line, and a small field like a single number fits inside a compact rectangle.

What Redaction Preserves

• Only the areas you covered are blocked; the rest of the page stays intact.
• Text outside the rectangles remains selectable and searchable.
• Page order, size, and overall layout are unchanged.
• Images and graphics outside the covered areas are left in place.
• Your original file on disk is not altered during the process.
• Rectangles can be removed with Undo Last before you apply them, but not afterward, so review before you finalize.

In short, redaction is a targeted edit. Everything outside the rectangles is preserved exactly, and the output is a normal PDF that opens in any viewer with no special software on the receiving end.

Privacy and Limits

Pages are rendered and edited in the browser using local libraries, and the final file is assembled on your machine. No copy of the document is uploaded, stored, or logged, which makes the tool suitable for legal forms, human resources paperwork, and medical records you would not want traveling across a network. Free users can process files up to 10 MB and wait a few seconds before each run; Premium subscribers get a 100 MB limit and no wait, which is helpful when redacting large scanned documents or several files in a row.