Black out (redact)

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

The word search only finds text the PDF stores as text. Words inside scanned images, logos or handwriting are not found, so draw boxes over them. Open the result and check that nothing was missed.

Your files are never sent anywhere.

How to use it

  1. Drop one PDF. Its pages appear at reading size.
  2. Type the words to black out, one per line (every occurrence is boxed), and drag boxes over anything else. Click a box to remove it.
  3. Press Run. Pages with a box are replaced by an image with the boxes painted; the others stay as they are.

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. Scanned pages have no text: draw boxes on them, or run Text recognition (OCR) first.

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