Redact a PDF by Drawing Boxes (Burn-in)
Draw rectangles over sensitive content. When you export, the tool burns in those areas so they can’t be recovered. All processing happens on your device.
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).