Drawing a black box over text in a PDF editor doesn't actually delete anything underneath it — the original text often remains selectable, copyable, or recoverable by anyone who knows to try. Real redaction means the underlying content is genuinely gone, not just visually covered.
A black rectangle drawn as an annotation sits on top of the original page content as a separate layer; removing or even just selecting around that annotation can reveal what's underneath. Genuine redaction needs to remove the actual underlying content, not just obscure it visually.
Because true redaction needs to know exactly which regions to permanently strip, you mark the areas to redact directly on a preview of each page before processing — giving you full control over precisely what gets removed.
Ready to try it?
Redact text and graphics to permanently remove sensitive information from a PDF.
⬛ Open Redact PDF →Yes, our redaction permanently deletes the underlying data, unlike a simple black box overlay.
Yes, both text and image regions can be selected for redaction.
No, once redacted and downloaded, the original content cannot be restored from that file.