Black out (redact)

Paint black boxes over words or areas; the pages under the boxes become pictures, so the text is truly gone.

The search only finds text the PDF holds as text; pages without text can be read first, but reading can miss words. Names, logos and handwriting are not found automatically, so draw over them. Open the result and check that nothing was missed.

Your files are never uploaded.

How to use it

Drop one PDF. Its pages appear at reading size.
Choose Find automatically (e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, ID numbers) and/or Type words. What is found shows as dashed boxes on the pages and in the list: click one to leave it out, click again to put it back. Drag on a page to draw a box, a pen line or a thick highlighter line over anything else; click it to move it, drag a corner to resize it, press Delete to remove it, Ctrl+Z to undo.
Press Run. Pages with a box become pictures with the boxes painted; the finished file is then checked, and a report says whether anything is left.

Read the guide: How to redact a PDF without Adobe, and check the text is really gone

Questions and answers

Is the text really gone, or just covered?

Gone. A page with a box is replaced by a picture of itself with the box already painted, so there is no text object left to select, search or copy on that page. Pages without a box keep their text.

Can I search the file afterwards?

The blacked-out pages are pictures. To make them searchable again, run Text recognition (OCR) on the result, or chain both in the workflow.

Does the word search find everything?

It finds the words the PDF contains as text, ignoring case, and the kinds of data you ask for. Pages with no text (scans) can be read first: choose "Read the words on them first". Logos and handwriting are still not found: draw over them.

Recipes

Other tools

All tools