Redact a PDF

How it works

1. Drop the PDF onto the box. Its pages appear below.
2. Drag across each name, number or passage to hide, or tap a line to place a box there. Move boxes by dragging them and resize them by their corners.
3. Choose black boxes, or white if the removed areas should look blank.
4. Press Redact and save. In the downloaded PDF, the marked content is gone: searching or copying cannot bring it back.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from drawing a black box?

A box drawn in a PDF viewer or an office app only covers the text. It is still in the file and can be copied, found by search, or revealed by moving the box. This tool deletes the text, image pixels and drawings under each mark from the page, and removes the old page content from the file.

Does the rest of the page stay selectable text?

On most pages, yes: only the glyphs under your marks are cut out, and everything else is left exactly as it was written. There is one case where that is not possible — when a photograph, a scanned signature or a drawing sits under a mark. Pixels cannot be cut out the way letters can, so that page is redrawn as a picture at 200 dpi with the box already burnt in. It looks the same and prints the same, but the text on that one page stops being selectable; the other pages are untouched. The trade is deliberate: the alternative would be to remove the words and leave the picture, which is not a redaction.

Does it work on scanned documents?

Yes. On a scan the page is an image, and the pixels under each mark are replaced, so scanned text is removed as well.

What is not removed?

Only what is under your marks is removed. Document properties such as the author, bookmarks, attachments and form values elsewhere stay as they are. Check the file's properties before sharing if they could contain names.

Can a redaction be undone?

Not from the saved file. Keep an unredacted original for yourself if you need one.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. Pages are rendered and redacted in your browser, by the same code that draws every other PDF here. Free PDFs end with a small “Made with nouplo.com” line; Pro removes it, along with the limits of 20 MB per file and 10 runs per day.