Redact PDF Online Free — Permanently Remove Sensitive Text

This tool permanently removes sensitive text, numbers, or images from a PDF — not just a black box drawn over them. Mark the regions you want gone, and any page containing a mark is rendered to a flattened image before export, so nothing from the original text or graphics underneath survives in the file.

That's the key difference from a "highlight" or a black rectangle placed on top of a page in a regular PDF editor: those only hide content visually — the original text is still there in the file and can be selected, copied, or extracted with basic tools. A page redacted here has no text layer left at all.

Everything runs locally via pdf-lib and pdfjs in your browser — your file and every region you mark never leave your device.

1. Upload your PDF — Select the document containing sensitive content.
2. Mark a region — Switch to the "Mark for Redaction" tool and drag a box over any text, number, or image to remove.
3. Repeat as needed — Mark as many regions as you need, across any pages.
4. Adjust if needed — Switch to Select to move to a region and delete it before exporting, if you marked the wrong spot.
5. Export — Click "Redact & Export PDF." Every page with a mark is flattened to remove the marked content; every other page is left untouched.

A redaction tool that only draws a shape over sensitive text is not actually redacting anything — the text is still in the file's content stream, and can be recovered by selecting it, copying it, or opening the file in a text editor. That kind of false redaction has caused real, public disclosure incidents.

To guarantee removal, this tool renders any page with a marked region to an image with the region painted opaque before the image is created — the original text, vector shapes, and embedded images on that page are never written into the output file at all. The tradeoff is honest: a redacted page's text is no longer selectable or searchable, because the whole page is now a picture of itself. Pages you don't mark are copied through unchanged, with real, selectable text intact.

• True content removal — Marked regions are gone from the underlying file, not just visually covered.
• Multiple regions, multiple pages — Mark as many regions as you need, on any page, and export once.
• Untouched pages stay real — Pages with no marks keep their original, selectable text.
• Honest tradeoff, upfront — The tool tells you exactly which pages will lose text selectability before you export.
• 100% client-side — Your PDF and every region you mark stay on your device.

• Redacting personal data — Remove names, addresses, SSNs, or account numbers before sharing a document.
• Legal and compliance — Prepare discovery documents or public records requests where covered information must be genuinely unrecoverable.
• Removing confidential figures — Black out pricing, financials, or proprietary data before sending a report externally.
• Sanitizing scanned documents — Remove sensitive stamps, signatures, or handwritten notes from scanned pages.