Drag a box over anything private, or let the page find emails, phone numbers and card numbers for you. When you save, every page is rebuilt from what you see, so the words under the boxes are gone from the file, not hidden behind a shape. The PDF never leaves this page.
Most PDF editors, and every "add a rectangle" tool, put the black box on a layer above the page. The text is still underneath. Anyone can select it and copy it, search for it, or just delete the box. Court filings and government reports have leaked this way more than once.
Real redaction removes the content. Paid tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro do it by editing the text inside the file. This page does it the blunt, reliable way: it draws each page as an image, burns the boxes in, and writes a new PDF from those images. Nothing from the original file is copied across: no text, no hidden layers, no form data, no attachments, no metadata.
| This page | Acrobat Pro "Redact" | |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden text removed | Yes, along with all other text | Yes |
| Rest of the text still selectable | No, pages become images | Yes |
| Metadata, layers, attachments removed | Always | With "Sanitize document" |
| File size | Usually larger | About the same |
| Cost | Free, nothing installed | Paid subscription |
Pages are drawn at about 144 dots per inch, which reads clearly on screen and prints well for ordinary documents.
If the PDF comes from a web page, such as an invoice, a support ticket or a dashboard, the safer order is to black the details out before the PDF exists.
Saves any web page as a PDF or image, and finds emails, card numbers, API keys and IBANs on it and blacks them out before the file is written. In PDFs it also drops any link that sits under a black box, so the address can't give away what the box hides. Nothing is uploaded.
Get Full Page Screenshot for ChromeRelated: redact an image · redact a screenshot safely · save a webpage as a PDF.