Drawing a black box over text in a PDF does not remove it. The words stay in the file, selectable and searchable, and any PDF reader will hand them back. We measured that on this site: a page covered with a black rectangle still gave up every word in one step. This tool deletes what is under each box from the file itself: the letters, pictures and drawings there are removed, while the rest of the page stays real text. Then it reads the finished file back and shows you whether the phrases you named can still be found.
PDF · stays on your device
A new DeskKit tool lands every week or two. Leave an address to hear about it. Nothing else is ever sent, and one click removes you.
Because a PDF keeps its text separately from what is drawn on the page. A rectangle is another object placed on top; the words underneath are untouched and any reader, or the PDF-to-text tool on this site, will return them. We measured it while building this: a document covered with a black rectangle took 46 milliseconds to produce and handed back the hidden line verbatim. Redactions of exactly this kind have been undone in published court filings more than once.
Everything inside each box you draw is deleted from the file: the letters, the parts of pictures and the drawings under it. Every page is then read back to make sure nothing is left underneath, and if anything is, the job stops rather than handing you a half-clean file. Text outside the boxes is untouched, so it stays searchable and selectable. The redaction engine is PdfCraft, an open-source library compiled to run inside your browser. If it cannot handle a file, the tool tells you and falls back to the older method of turning the marked pages into pictures.
Only what is under the boxes. The rest of the page keeps its text and layout, and the file stays about the same size: our sample bank statement went from 9 KB to 8 KB. If you prefer the older method, tick the box that turns marked pages into pictures instead. Those pages then lose their text layer completely, cannot be searched, and make the file larger (in our measurement one such page took a 7 KB document to 170 KB).
No. Everything — rendering, covering, rebuilding and the check — happens in this page on your own machine. A document you are redacting is by definition one you do not want other people to have, so sending it to a server to be made private would be a strange way round.
Type the phrases that must not survive and, once the new file is built, its text is extracted and searched for them. You get a line per phrase saying GONE or STILL THERE. It is a small thing and it is the whole point: a claim that something was redacted is worth much less than a search of the finished file showing it is not in there. If you name nothing, you are told that nothing was checked rather than being given a green tick. Separately, the finished file is checked for any text still sitting inside your boxes, and you are shown that result too.
These all work the same way, in your browser. Most are free; the ones marked as needing a plan are not.
Working from a bank statement or an invoice PDF instead of a plain document? A paid tool turns those into an Excel or QuickBooks file directly, and this page here stays free either way.