Permanently redact a PDF.

"I drew a black rectangle over the sensitive text in Preview" is the most-viraled data leak of the last decade. The text is still selectable, still copy-pasteable, still searchable. Real redaction removes the underlying text — usually by rasterizing.

Time: 3 minutesTool: /pdf-redact/Uploads: None

The problem with rectangles

Drawing a black shape over text in a PDF viewer (Preview, Acrobat annotations, Word "black highlight," anything similar) adds a black object on top of the text. The text underneath is unchanged. Any of these recovers it:

Select-all + copy → paste into a note app.
Open the PDF in a code editor as raw bytes — the text is right there as UTF-8 or embedded font glyphs.
Use a "remove annotations" tool — the black shape is an annotation.
OCR the page — even if the text object were removed, OCR would re-read the pixels.

This is how Manafort, the NYPD, the CIA, and countless law firms have leaked redacted content. The mistake is universal.

Real redaction: rasterize

/pdf-redact/ does the correct thing:

Draw the redaction on each page. Mouse or touch. The tool overlays a transparent black preview.
On export, each page is rasterized — rendered to a bitmap at high resolution — then the black boxes are drawn as opaque pixels. The final PDF contains only images, no text objects.
Verify. After download, open the redacted PDF in any viewer and try Select-All + Copy. The blacked-out region returns nothing. OCR on the black region returns nothing. There are no annotations to strip.

Tradeoff. Rasterized PDFs are images. Un-redacted text also becomes an image — meaning: no more copy-pasteable text, no more search, larger file size (usually 3-5x). This is the point. If you need copy-pasteable text elsewhere in the document, redact those pages, then merge the redacted pages back into the original in /pdf/.

Step-by-step

Open /pdf-redact/. Drop the PDF.
Navigate pages with Prev / Next.
Draw a rectangle over every sensitive region. Names, SSNs, account numbers, addresses, signatures.
Undo if you slip. Clear-page to restart a page.
Export. Rasterization + composition happens on export — a "before" preview intentionally shows the transparent overlay so you can double-check placement.
Verify the export. Open the downloaded PDF, try Select-All, try OCR on a redacted region. Should be blank.

What about metadata?

Rasterizing removes the PDF's text-layer but not its top-level metadata (Author, Creator, ModDate). Chain into /pdf/'s "Strip metadata" mode to clean those too.

Legal / evidentiary use

Rasterized redaction is what the U.S. National Archives' technical guidelines recommend for FOIA releases. It's what courts accept as "true redaction." It's not, however, cryptographically signed — for court-of-record use, you may still need a signed hash of the redacted PDF or a chain-of-custody workflow that browser-based tools can't provide.

Do it now

Open the tool in a new tab. Nothing uploads.

→ Open /pdf-redact/