Black out parts of a PDF so they stay gone

Drawing a rectangle over text in an editor doesn't remove it — the content stays underneath, selectable. Rasterized redaction actually deletes it.

Tools used in this guide

The job

Fake redaction is a famous failure mode: a black rectangle in the annotation layer leaves the text in the file, copyable by anyone who deletes the rectangle. Real redaction removes the content itself.

Mark, then rebuild

Choose the PDF and drag rectangles over every secret, page by page — marks are preview shapes only until you rebuild. On rebuild, each page is re-rendered as a flat image with the marked areas painted over, then a new PDF is assembled from those images.

Nothing underneath survives: the output has no text layer at all — no selection, no search, no hidden copy.
That also means the whole document is no longer searchable. If recipients need to copy unmarked text, keep a second, unredacted copy for yourself.

Verify before sending

Open the downloaded PDF and try to select or search the covered text — it should fail. Check mark edges: content can peek out from under a too-tight rectangle, so mark generously. Limits: 25 MiB, 30 pages, encrypted PDFs aren't supported.