Black out text in a PDF with PDF Redact
This opens a letter with the word confidential already typed into the search box and the draw tool in front. Draw boxes over anything, press Find matches to mark the word everywhere, then export. After export, try selecting text in the result: there is none to select.
- Open the PDF and drag boxes over the text to cover, or search for words and mark the hits.
- Drag a box to move it, pull a corner to resize it, Delete removes it, Ctrl or Cmd with Z undoes.
- Open Review to see the burned-in pages.
- Export, read the report, download, then try to select text in the result to confirm there is none.
What to know
The most common failure of a black box is that the text stays in the file. Select all in the result, paste into a text editor, and the words come back. This tool writes pages as pictures, so there is nothing to select: after export the check opens the file and reports how many characters could be extracted, and it should be zero.
Boxes snap to pixels at the chosen resolution and always round outward, so a half-covered pixel at an edge becomes fully black. Text boxes found by search get a small margin; a hand-drawn box is exactly the rectangle you drew, so leave a little room around the letters. The page keeps its size and orientation. A page that was stored rotated is written upright, so it looks the same as it did on your screen.
Updated · Cosmovex
Questions
Can the hidden text be recovered from the output?
There is no hidden text: the output contains only page images with the boxes painted into the pixels. The check re-opens the file and confirms there is no text layer.
Why is the file bigger than the original?
Each page is stored as an image. JPEG keeps it small; Lossless gives sharper small text and is larger.
What do I lose when the output is made of images?
Text in the whole output can no longer be selected, searched or copied, links and form fields stop working, and the file is usually larger. That is the cost of making sure the covered content is really gone, and the tool says so before you export.
How do I know the black boxes really removed the text?
After export the tool re-opens the file it just wrote and checks it: it contains only page images, there is no text layer to extract, and the pixels inside every box are black. You should still open the result and read every page; the checks cannot tell whether you covered everything sensitive.
The free plan covers everything on this page. PDF Redact Pro ($29, paid once) is described on the PDF Redact page.
