Redact a PDF — properly
Drag a black bar over anything that has to go. The pages you mark are flattened, so the text underneath is destroyed rather than covered up. No account, no upload.
People have lost court cases and leaked witness names this way: a black rectangle drawn over live text is a sticker, not a redaction. Select underneath it, copy, paste — the text is still there. This tool re-renders every page you touch into a bitmap with the bars burned in, and never writes the original text objects into the output file. There is nothing left to recover.
◆ What most tools do
Draw a black rectangle on top of the page as an annotation. The words are still in the file. Anyone can select through it, copy it out, or delete the box in a PDF editor.
◆ What this does
Re-render the marked page to an image with the bars burned in, and build the output from that. The original text objects are never copied across. Nothing underneath, because there is no underneath.
Questions people ask
Does this actually remove the text, or just cover it?
It removes it. Each page you mark is re-rendered to an image with the black bars burned in, and the original text objects are never copied into the output document. There is nothing underneath to select, copy or recover — which is exactly the failure mode of drawing a black rectangle in a normal PDF editor.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The file is opened, re-rendered and re-written entirely inside your browser. The uploads counter in the top bar stays at 0, and you can watch it in your dev-tools Network tab. For a document sensitive enough to need redacting, that is rather the point.
Will my whole document become an image?
Only the pages you actually marked. Pages with no bars on them are copied through untouched and keep their selectable, searchable text. Flattening costs you searchability and file size, so it is applied only where you asked for it.
Does it remove hidden metadata too?
The output is built as a fresh PDF rather than an edit of the original, so document-level metadata from the source is not carried across. The visible content of untouched pages is copied; the marked pages are rebuilt from pixels.
Do I need an account?
No. No signup, no email, no watermark and no page limit.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Once the page has loaded it keeps working with no connection — it is just code running on your device.
How this works & why it’s private
Your PDF is read into memory, rendered page-by-page to a <canvas> with pdf.js, and rebuilt with pdf-lib — all local JavaScript, served from this domain, running on your device. For a page you marked, the canvas is filled with the rendered page, the black bars are painted onto those pixels, and the result is embedded into a brand-new PDF page as an image. The source page's text objects are simply never copied into the output document, which is what makes the redaction real rather than cosmetic. Pages you did not mark are copied across as-is so they stay searchable. No server sees any of it — open your dev-tools Network tab and watch.