How to Redact a PDF So the Text Is Really Gone

Drawing a black rectangle over text only hides it from the eye. The words are still in the file underneath, so anyone can select the area, copy it, search for it or pull it out with a text extraction tool. Documents have been released with 'redacted' passages that were recovered this way. True redaction removes the content from the file itself.

Redact PDF runs in your browser, so the document is not uploaded.

1. Open Redact PDF and select your PDF. Enter the password if it is protected.
2. Drag a box over each area to remove, or search for a word, an email address, a phone number or a card-like number.
3. Check the orange outlines of the search matches, then choose Redact all matches.
4. Look through every page. Remove a box with its cross if you marked too much.
5. Select Redact PDF and download the result.

Each page with a marked area is rebuilt as a picture of the page with those areas painted black. The original text and images are not carried over, so there is nothing underneath to recover. Pages you did not mark keep their selectable text. If you need the redacted pages to be searchable again, turn on the optional search layer before you redact, or run OCR PDF on the result. The option sends only the already-redacted file to our server for OCR.

Do not trust a redaction you have not tested.

• Open the downloaded file and try to select the redacted areas. Nothing should highlight.
• Search for a word you removed. There should be no match on the redacted pages.
• Check the document properties for an author, title or other details you meant to remove.

Searching reads the real text in the PDF. It cannot read words inside a scanned picture, and it can miss a name that is spelled differently or split in an unusual way. The email, phone and card searches are a starting point, not a guarantee. Always scroll through the pages and draw a box over anything that was missed.