Redact a PDF automatically

How it works

1. Drop the PDF onto the box. The text is searched as soon as it loads and the marks appear on the pages.
2. Check every mark. Drag one to move it, pull a corner to resize it, remove the ones you want to keep, and drag across anything it missed — a name, a signature, a photograph.
3. Choose black boxes, or white if the removed areas should look blank.
4. Press Redact and save. What is marked is deleted from the file: searching or copying cannot bring it back.

Frequently asked questions

What does it look for?

Email addresses, telephone numbers, payment card numbers, IBANs, and identity numbers — the Japanese individual number and the American social security shape. Nothing is proposed on a shape alone where a shape could be innocent: a card number has to satisfy the Luhn check, an IBAN its mod-97 remainder, an individual number its own check digit. That is what keeps an invoice number, an order reference or a date out of the proposals, and a proposal list nobody trusts is worse than none, because it gets accepted without being read.

Does it find names?

No, and it does not pretend to. A name is a word, and telling one from an ordinary word needs a model that would have to be downloaded and would still be wrong often enough to matter here. Names are the thing to mark by hand, on top of what the search found — which is why the marks are shown to you rather than applied.

Is anything removed before I see it?

No. The search only proposes. What it finds arrives as ordinary marks, exactly the kind you would drag yourself, and nothing leaves the document until you press the button. Removing anything is the same code that has always done it: the glyphs are cut out of the page, or the page is redrawn as a picture where a photograph sits under a mark.

What about scanned pages?

A scan is a picture of text and carries no text to search, so those pages are not searched and the editor says how many there were. Mark them by hand — the redaction itself works on scans, because the pixels under a mark are replaced.

How careful should I be with the result?

Very. Read the redacted file before you send it. An automatic search is a second pair of eyes, not a substitute for the first pair: it will find the numbers you would have skimmed past, and it will not find the sentence that identifies somebody by what it says about them.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. The search and the redaction both run in your browser. A document that needs redacting is usually a document that cannot be sent anywhere, which is the point of doing it here.