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PDF Tool

Redact Sensitive Text in a PDF

Black out names, emails, phone numbers, IDs, and any custom keyword in your PDF. Choose secure mode to bake the redactions into the page so the underlying text can't be copied or recovered. Runs entirely in your browser your file never leaves your device.

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Secure mode rasterizes pages so the original text underneath the black bars is permanently removed. Higher quality preserves sharper detail but creates a larger file.

How It Works

Two redaction modes for different threat models

Quick mode (overlay) applies black rectangles using pdf-lib and preserves the original PDF content. Secure mode rasterizes every page at the chosen DPI, baking the redactions into the pixel layer so the underlying text cannot be extracted or recovered.

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Privacy

Your file never leaves your device

All processing happens entirely inside your browser tab. Your PDF is never uploaded, never stored, and never shared with any server. For legal, medical, or financial documents that require redaction before sharing, this local-only model is the only way to guarantee no trace of the original content remains in the output.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does 'Secure' mode mean?
Secure mode rasterizes every page at the chosen DPI so the original text under each black bar is permanently removed from the file. Underlying characters cannot be copied, extracted, or recovered with a text-search tool. Quick mode simply draws black rectangles over the matched text the original characters are still present in the PDF structure.
What types of sensitive data can be auto-detected?
The tool automatically finds email addresses, phone numbers, US Social Security numbers (NNN-NN-NNNN format), credit card numbers, IBAN bank account numbers, IPv4 addresses, and date strings. You can enable any combination of these in addition to your own keywords.
Does the tool upload my PDF to a server?
No. Everything runs entirely in your browser. Your PDF is loaded into browser memory, processed locally, and delivered back to you as a download. No file content is ever transmitted to any server.
Can I undo a redaction?
Once you download the Secure-mode output, the original text beneath the black bars is permanently gone and cannot be recovered. Keep a copy of the original file before redaction if you may need the unredacted version later.
What is the difference between 'whole word' and 'case-sensitive'?
Whole word matching ensures a match only happens when the keyword is surrounded by word boundaries for example, 'John' will not match inside 'Johnson'. Case-sensitive matching requires uppercase and lowercase letters to match exactly. Both options can be combined.
Why is the output file larger in Secure mode?
Secure mode converts each PDF page into a high-resolution JPEG image and reassembles them into a new PDF. The file size depends on page count, DPI setting, and page complexity. A 200 DPI output is typically 5–20 MB for a typical document, while 300 DPI is larger but preserves more detail.
How does the text scanner find matches?
The tool uses pdfjs to extract the text content from each page along with the bounding box coordinates of every text run. It then runs your keywords and enabled detector patterns against that text, and converts the character offsets back to spatial coordinates. This means matches are found even inside multi-column layouts.