ZERO-TRUST PDF

Redact PDF files without uploading them

Don't trust the cloud with your PDFs.

  • Nothing is uploaded

    The file is opened, edited and exported by this tab. Once the page has finished loading you can cut the network and this tool carries on, which beats taking our word for it. Other pages here still need a connection to open.

  • No account, no limits

    No sign-up, no daily cap, no watermark, no paid tier holding the useful half back. No file of yours is processed on a server, so there is no per-file cost to recover.

  • You can check the result

    After an export, Verify reads the finished file back off your device and lets you search what is still extractable from it.

What this tool does

Drop in a PDF and it opens in an editor. Drag a box over anything that should not be in the document any more, move through the pages and mark whatever else needs it, then export. What comes back is a new file with the marked areas gone, the form fields merged into the page, and the document metadata cleared. The original on your device is not touched.

It works on a phone. Redaction is something people do to a document they were just sent, often on the device it arrived on, so drawing is built on pointer events and the delete target on each box is sized for a thumb rather than a mouse. There is no separate mobile version and no app to install.

How the redaction actually works

Marking an area does not erase characters out of the page. Every page you marked is rendered to an image with the marked rectangles painted opaque, and the document you download is then assembled fresh: a new file, the pages you did not touch copied across, and a new blank page carrying the image in place of each page you did.

The rebuild is the part that matters, and it is the part most tools skip. A PDF keeps its objects in a numbered pile, and taking a page out of the document's page list only removes a pointer to that pile. Unless something goes looking for what is now unreferenced, the old page's content is still in the file. Building a new document instead and copying nothing from a marked page means there is nothing left over to find. If you want the long version, including a demonstration you can run yourself and an account of the version of this tool that got it wrong, it is on how to properly redact a PDF.

What it costs you

Rasterizing a page removes the text layer for that entire page, not just the part you covered. Every other word on it stops being selectable, searchable and copyable, a screen reader can no longer read any of it, and the file gets bigger. That is the price of the text genuinely being gone, and any tool that does not mention it is not telling you the whole thing.

Pages you did not mark keep their text exactly as it was, because nothing on them is rasterized. So the cost is per page, and it is worth marking only the pages that need it. After you export, the Verify panel will tell you which pages still have a text layer and which do not, and let you search the ones that do.

What it does not handle

Password-protected documents are refused rather than half-processed; remove the password in whatever wrote the file and come back. XFA forms, the kind produced by older enterprise tooling, cannot be flattened by the library underneath this and the page will say so when it sees one. Signed documents are flagged too: any export rewrites the file, which breaks the signature, though your original is untouched.

Metadata inside embedded images is not cleared. A photograph placed into a PDF carries its own EXIF block with a camera model and sometimes GPS coordinates, and that block belongs to the image rather than the document. The rebuild also drops document outlines and the tagged structure tree, because those do not survive being copied between documents.

Very large files are the honest weak spot. Rasterizing runs in this tab, so a big document will make the page sit still while it works, and anything over 50 MB asks before it opens. On a phone a very large scan can run the tab out of memory. And if you have no redaction to do and only want form fields merged into the page, you do not need this at all — that is the flatten tool, which leaves your text as text.

Common questions

How do I redact a PDF?
Drop the file into the tool at the top of this page, drag a box over anything you want gone, and export. Every page you marked is rasterized so the text on it stops existing rather than being covered up, and the file you download is built from scratch rather than edited in place. Nothing is uploaded. Let this page load, and everything after that happens on your own device: the redaction and the export both go through with the connection already cut. What needs the network is opening a different page, since each one is fetched when you navigate to it.
What does it mean to redact a PDF?
Redacting means removing information from a document so it cannot be recovered, rather than hiding it so it cannot be seen. The difference matters more in a PDF than almost anywhere else, because the obvious way to hide something — drawing a black rectangle over it — leaves the original text sitting in the file underneath, where selecting the page and copying it brings the words straight back. A redaction that worked is one that survives being checked.
How do I redact text or information in a PDF?
Draw a box over the words you want removed. You can mark several areas on a page and several pages in a document, undo a box you did not mean to draw, and clear a page and start again. On export, every page carrying a box is rasterized and the document is rebuilt without the originals. Because the whole page becomes an image, the rest of the text on that page stops being selectable as well, so it is worth marking the pages that need it and leaving the others alone.
How do I redact a PDF for free?
There is no paid tier here, no sign-up, no daily cap and no watermark on the way out. That works because the redaction runs on your machine rather than on ours, so a hundred documents cost us exactly what none do. Ads pay for the site, they come from Google, and they set cookies in your browser the way ads do anywhere. What they never get is the document, which is not uploaded and never was.