# Redact a PDF — Permanently Remove Sensitive Content

> Black out names, figures or images so they are genuinely gone, not just hidden behind a box.

Drawing a black rectangle over a name is not redaction — the text is still in the file and anyone can select it, which is how redaction failures keep making the news. This removes the content properly: every page carrying a redaction is re-rendered to pixels with the marked areas painted out, so there is nothing underneath to recover. Pages you did not mark keep their original vector text and stay searchable. Everything happens in your browser, which matters when the document is exactly the kind you cannot upload.

**URL:** https://convertto.tech/t/redact-pdf
**Category:** PDF Tools (https://convertto.tech/c/pdf-tools)
**Privacy:** Runs entirely in the browser; no upload
**Cost:** Free, no sign-up
**Last updated:** 2026-08-01

## Key facts

- **Method:** Redacted pages are rasterised — the underlying text is destroyed, not covered
- **Scope:** Only pages with redactions are rebuilt; the rest keep selectable text
- **Privacy:** Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
- **Cost:** Free, unlimited, no sign-up

## How to use

1. Select your pdf file — the file stays on your device and is never uploaded.
2. Enter or paste your redactions.
3. Set the rendering quality.
4. Turn "Also strip document metadata" on or off as needed.
5. Press Run, then download the result when it is ready.

## FAQ

### How is this different from drawing a black box?

A black box is a shape drawn on top. The text remains in the content stream underneath, so selecting the area and copying it reveals everything — this is the mistake behind a long series of published documents leaking exactly what they meant to hide. Here the page is re-rendered as an image with the area painted out before the image is made, so the characters no longer exist in the file.

### Why do redacted pages become images?

Because that is the only way to guarantee removal in a browser. Surgically deleting individual glyphs from a content stream while leaving the rest intact needs a full PDF writer and still risks missing a copy in a form field or an annotation. Rasterising is blunt, but it is provably complete — and it is applied only to the pages you actually marked.

### Can the text be recovered from the image?

Not from the file. Someone could run OCR on the visible remainder, exactly as they could with a printed and rescanned page — but the redacted area is solid black pixels, so there is nothing there to read.

### Should I strip metadata too?

Usually yes. The document information dictionary records the author name from the operating system account and the application that produced it, which frequently identifies the person or department you were trying not to name. It is on by default.

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