Redact a PDF
Type the words to remove, or pick a pattern like every email address, and each match is blacked out. Then the pages are re-rendered, so the text underneath the boxes is gone from the file rather than hidden behind a rectangle.
Or match a pattern
This removes the text, it does not cover it. Every page is re-rendered after the boxes are drawn, so the words are not in the output file at all — which is the whole point, and also why the document stops being searchable. Keep the original.
The text layer is read on your device. Nothing is uploaded at any point — which matters more here than anywhere else on this site.
One term per line, or comma-separated. Add patterns to catch every email address, phone number, card number, national insurance number or IBAN without typing them out.
Each match is located, boxed in black, and the page re-rendered with the box burned in.
The result reports how many matches it found. Open it and search for the terms — they should return nothing.
Drawing a black box over a name in most editors leaves the name in the file, underneath. Selecting the area and copying it, or running any extraction tool, brings it straight back. This is the single most common way confidential documents leak. Here the page is re-rendered after the box is drawn, so the characters are not in the output at all.
Removing text by re-rendering means every page becomes an image. The document is no longer searchable or selectable, and screen readers cannot read it. That is a real cost, and it is the price of the guarantee — keep the original somewhere safe.
PDFs split words across text objects for kerning, so a naive search misses half of them. The page text is reassembled into one string with a map back to each fragment, so a term split between two objects is still found and each part boxed.
A calm, fast PDF workspace. Free to use, private by default.
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