Redact without Adobe with PDF Redact
This opens a short letter and the draw tool, so you can drag a box over a name and see the result before exporting. It is an alternative for the common job of removing a few names and numbers from a PDF; it does not replace everything Acrobat does.
- Open your PDF, or keep the sample letter.
- Drag on the page to draw a black box over what must go. Drag a box to move it, pull a corner to resize it, press Delete to remove it.
- Or type a name into the exact terms field and press Find matches to box every occurrence.
- Review the pages, then export. Read the check report and download.
What to know
The usual way to get this wrong is to draw a black rectangle on top of text in a viewer or a word processor: the rectangle is only a shape on top, and the text is still in the file, selectable and searchable underneath. This tool does not place shapes on top. It replaces every page with a picture that already has the black pixels in it.
Acrobat Pro does true redaction and keeps the rest of the document searchable, which this tool cannot. The trade-off here is deliberate: rasterising is simple to reason about, and it also removes the things people forget, such as comments, form fields, attachments, bookmarks, document properties and the earlier saved versions inside the file. Free covers a PDF of up to 10 pages with manual boxes, text search and the checks after export. Pro is a one-time $29 and adds longer files, saved rule sets, batches and a higher resolution.
Updated · Cosmovex
Questions
Is this a full replacement for Acrobat?
No. It does one job: permanent black-box redaction of short documents. It does not edit text, fill forms or keep the output searchable.
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.
Can I just draw a black rectangle in a PDF viewer?
Not safely. A rectangle drawn in a viewer or word processor sits on top of the text, which usually stays in the file and can be copied out. Use a tool that rewrites the page, as this one does, and check the result.
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.
