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Redact PDF

Free
Drag opaque rectangles over sensitive content on page 1. Visual cover only — see FAQ on what this does and doesn't do.

What you'll get: a PDF with opaque black / white / gray rectangles covering sensitive content on page 1. Visual cover only — for high-stakes redaction (court filings, FOIA), see FAQ. For another use, try Highlight PDF.

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Free tools run fully on-device — nothing is uploaded to a server.
No watermarks
Clean output, no branding, no daily limits.
Free forever
No signup required. Seriously.

Why people redact PDFs

Redaction covers sensitive information before sharing. Names, addresses, account numbers, internal pricing, customer data — everything you want to hide from a wider audience. Our free redact is VISUAL: an opaque rectangle drawn over the content. Read the FAQ before using this on anything high-stakes.

Anonymizing screenshots
Hide names, emails, or session tokens in a screenshot before sharing it in a bug report or public docs.
Hiding pricing in proposals
Cover the pricing tables before passing a proposal around internally for review without revealing commercial terms.
Personal info on printouts
Cover account numbers or DOB on a statement before stapling it to an expense form.
Internal-only routing notes
Hide internal annotations before sending a finalized doc to a customer.
Source quotes in research
When sharing a passage, cover the parts of the surrounding paragraph not relevant to the quote.
Pre-archive cleanup
Cover sensitive sections of scanned old documents before archiving on a shared drive.

How Redact PDF works

Three steps, no signup, no uploads.

  1. STEP 1
    Drop your PDF
    Up to 100 MB. PDFium renders page 1 at 1.5× as the editor canvas.
  2. STEP 2
    Drag to add redaction boxes
    Click and drag anywhere on the page to draw an opaque rectangle. Drag again to add more. Pick black, white (erase effect), or gray.
  3. STEP 3
    Apply & download
    We draw opaque rectangles on top of page 1 via pdf-lib drawRectangle. Lossless to other content; the underlying objects remain in the file.

What makes pdfcraft ai different

  • Same engine Chrome uses
    PDFium is Google's PDF engine — the one that powers Chrome's built-in PDF viewer. We compile it to WebAssembly so it runs in your browser at near-native speed.
  • 100% local processing
    Most free PDF tools upload your file to a server, process it, and stream the result back. We don't. Your file lives in your browser tab and never touches our infrastructure. Verifiable in your browser's Network panel.
  • No watermark, no signup, no daily limit
    Convert 1 PDF or 1,000. We don't gate on volume because there's nothing to gate on — the engine runs on your machine.
  • Honest about limitations
    When something the tool can't do (encrypted PDFs, cross-reference streams), we tell you clearly instead of failing silently. Same for partial results: sampled vs exact, embedded vs not.
  • Open standards, free engines
    PDFium is BSD/Apache licensed (free for any use). We don't pay vendor license fees and pass that savings on to you (and to ourselves) as a free, ad-supported tool with no upgrade-to-pro pressure.

Frequently asked questions

Is this real redaction or just a visual cover?
Visual cover. The original text and images still exist in the PDF’s content stream — they’re just visually hidden behind a black rectangle. Anyone with PDF tooling (pdftotext, qpdf, Adobe Acrobat’s text extract, even copy-paste in some viewers) can recover what was under the box. Use this for low-stakes uses only.
What should I use for true redaction?
Three practical options. (1) Rasterize the page first (PDF → JPG → PDF) — the page becomes a flat image, nothing recoverable. We ship Rasterize as a separate tool. (2) Adobe Acrobat’s Pro redaction feature destroys the underlying objects. (3) Server-side qpdf or pdfcpu with a destructive redact op. We’re evaluating shipping a server-side true-redact op as a credit-paid AI tool.
Why does the tool exist if it isn’t real redaction?
Because most people’s actual use case is ‘hide a name on a screenshot before sharing,’ not ‘publish a court filing with FOIA-grade redactions.’ A free, fast, in-browser visual cover serves the common case. The longform and config-panel warning surface the limitation upfront so high-stakes users go elsewhere.
Can I redact every page?
v1 = page 1 only. Multi-page redaction needs page navigation in the editor (a v2 enhancement). Workaround: extract the page → redact → merge back.
What colors are supported?
Black (default), white (erase effect — useful when the underlying content has a colored background), and gray (less alarming visually than black for low-stakes documents).
Is anything uploaded?
No. PDFium renders the preview locally; pdf-lib applies the rectangles locally. The PDF never leaves your browser — important when you’re working with sensitive content.
Will the redacted content still appear in PDF-to-text exports?
Yes. Our PDF to Text tool extracts text from the underlying content stream, which still exists. If you need to verify what’s recoverable, run the redacted output through PDF to Text and see what comes back.

Need a true privacy strip?

Remove PDF Metadata strips Title, Author, Producer, dates, and XMP metadata — different operation, addresses metadata leaks rather than visible content.

Try Remove Metadata

Related PDF tools

Other tools in the Security category — built on the same private, in-browser pipeline.

Use cases for this tool

Step-by-step workflows that put this tool to work.

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