PDF Redactor

Most free "PDF redaction" tools, and most manual attempts inside a PDF viewer, do the same unsafe thing: they draw a black rectangle as a vector shape on top of the existing text layer. The characters are still there underneath, at their exact original positions, and can be recovered in seconds — select all the text and paste it into a notepad, run any PDF text extractor over the file, or in some notorious real-world cases just nudge or delete the rectangle object in a PDF editor. This exact failure mode has leaked names, salaries, case details and other supposedly-redacted information from government releases, legal filings and corporate documents. A black box that only covers the pixels visually is not redaction; it is decoration.

This tool redacts for real. Every page is rendered to a canvas with pdf.js, and you draw rectangles directly over what needs to disappear on that rendered preview. When you run the tool, it paints solid, fully opaque black boxes straight onto that page's pixel data at full resolution, exports the result as a flattened image, and that image — not the original vector content — becomes the new page in the output PDF via pdf-lib. There is no text layer left on a redacted page to select, search or extract, because the page is no longer text at all: it is a picture of a page with the sensitive parts permanently gone.

That destruction has an honest cost, and this tool does not hide it: any page you mark loses its vector crispness and selectable text, becoming a high-resolution image instead. Pages you leave untouched are copied straight through unchanged using pdf-lib's page-copying, so they keep full vector quality, searchable text and a small file size. A ten-page contract with one sensitive clause on page 4 comes out with nine crisp, selectable vector pages and one flattened image page — only the page that needed to lose its text actually loses it.

Everything happens locally: the PDF is rendered, marked and rebuilt entirely in your browser using pdf.js and pdf-lib, with nothing ever uploaded to a server — the right way to handle contracts, medical records, financial statements or any document with a name, account number or clause that must not survive the copy-paste test. Need to reorder, delete or rotate pages instead of blacking anything out? Use the PDF page organizer. Need to redact a screenshot or photo rather than a PDF? Use the blur/pixelate image tool, which destroys pixels the same honest way.