PDF Redaction (Burn-in)

Draw rectangles over sensitive content. When you export, the tool burns in those areas so they can’t be recovered. Everything runs locally in your browser.

Document & Settings

Opacity preview
Tip: Hold Shift while dragging to draw a square. Arrow keys nudge the last box by 1px (Shift+arrows = 10px).

Pages

Viewer

Preview opacity does not affect final burn-in (always solid fill). Color does.

How this redaction works

For each page, we render the PDF to an image and draw your redaction boxes on top. We then create a fresh PDF composed of those images. That means the covered regions are baked into the pixels—so the original text/graphics underneath are gone.

  • Private: runs completely in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
  • Permanent: redacted output no longer contains the hidden text/graphics.
  • Trade-off: output pages become images, so text won’t be selectable/searchable.

FAQ

Is this different from drawing black boxes in a PDF editor?

Yes. Many tools only overlay boxes (the original text remains underneath). This tool burns redactions into the page image so the content is removed.

Can I change the redaction color?

Yes. Choose any color. Final burn-in is a solid fill in that color.

What DPI should I use?

150–200 DPI is fine for most documents. Use 300 DPI when you need higher print quality (larger files).

5 Fun Facts about PDF Redaction

Black boxes aren’t erasers

In many editors the text under a drawn rectangle is still selectable. Only “burning” to pixels truly removes the underlying characters.

Overlay trap

OCR ghosts linger

Scanned PDFs often carry an invisible OCR text layer behind the image. If you don’t flatten it, searches can still surface “hidden” words.

Ghost text

Metadata can leak secrets

Titles, authors, even GPS data from embedded images can live in the PDF info dictionary—unredacted unless you scrub or rebuild the file.

Hidden breadcrumbs

Vectors never blur

PDF text is vector art; you can zoom forever and still copy it. Rasterizing pages is what actually kills the text layer.

Pixel or bust

Signatures break on edit

Digital signatures seal the exact bytes of a PDF. The moment you redact or flatten pages, that cryptographic seal is gone.

No more seal

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