# Redact PDF Redact a PDF by drawing black boxes over anything private. Every page is redrawn as an image, so the text underneath is gone. Free, never uploaded. Canonical page: https://filetity.com/redact-pdf ## Capabilities - Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit. - Account required: No. There is no account system. - Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to. - Formats: Any PDF in. PDF out, every page an image with the boxes painted on. - Limits: The result is a picture of each page: nothing is selectable, searchable or readable by a screen reader, and the file usually gets bigger. A password protected PDF is refused; remove the password first. What you draw is what is removed, so check every page before you send it, and keep the original. - Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser. - Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection. ## Questions ### Is the text under the box really gone, or only covered? Gone. The tool does not add a black rectangle to your PDF; it redraws every page as a picture and paints the box into the pixels before the picture is saved. There is no layer to remove and no text object underneath. You can check the result yourself: open it, press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A, and nothing selects, then search for a word you covered and nothing is found. ### Why is the redacted PDF no longer searchable? Because that is what makes the redaction hold. A PDF whose text is still text can always give that text back, so the whole document becomes pictures of pages, including the pages you did not touch. If you need a searchable copy, keep the original for yourself and send the redacted one. ### Can it find and redact a word or a pattern automatically? No. You draw every box by hand and what you draw is what is removed. Search-based redaction needs to trust that it found every occurrence, including the ones in images and scans, and a tool that misses one has done worse than nothing. Drawing is slower and it is honest. ### Does it remove metadata, bookmarks and attachments too? Yes, by construction. The result is a new PDF built from the page pictures alone, so the original's metadata, bookmarks, form fields, comments, attachments and hidden layers are not carried across. The file name is still yours to change. ### How big will the redacted file be? Usually bigger than the original. A page of text is a few kilobytes as text and a few hundred as a picture. Pages are drawn at about 144 DPI and saved as JPEG, which reads clearly on screen and prints acceptably. ### Why was my PDF refused? It is password protected. The pages cannot be drawn without the password, and the tool refuses rather than handing back a file it did nothing to. Remove the password on this site first, then come back. ## Related tools - [Unlock PDF and password protect PDF](https://filetity.com/protect-pdf): Remove PDF password protection when you know the password, or add AES-256 encryption. - [Flatten PDF](https://filetity.com/flatten-pdf): Make a PDF uneditable: form values, annotations and layers all fixed in place. - [Delete PDF pages](https://filetity.com/delete-pages-from-pdf): Remove the pages you do not want and keep everything else in order.