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Tools / Redact PDF

Redact a PDF

Removes the words. Does not draw a box over them.

Choose a PDF

or drop them here

How it works

  1. Add the PDF.
  2. Tick what to remove, and type any exact words as well.
  3. Download it, then read it before you send it on.

When the browser is not enough

scanmydocz for Android

Live edge detection through the camera, text recognition that makes the PDF searchable, a signature you can place, and batch capture. All of it on the phone.

In closed testing. There is no public Play link yet, so there is no button here yet.

scanmydocz Pro

Pro is the paid tier in the Android app. It cannot be bought on the web yet, because checkout is not connected, and we would rather say that than show you a price you cannot pay.

Questions

Is this different from drawing a black box?

Completely, and the difference is the point. A rectangle drawn in a PDF viewer sits on top of the text; the characters are still in the file and can be selected, copied or read by a script. That is how documents get published with redactions that anyone can undo. Here, every page that contains a match is replaced by an image of that page with the boxes burned in, so the characters are gone rather than hidden.

What does it cost me?

A redacted page stops being selectable text, because it is now a picture. Pages with nothing to remove are left exactly as they were and keep their text. If you need the whole document to stay searchable, redact it and then run the result through PDF OCR.

Can I trust the patterns to find everything?

No, and you should not. A pattern finds what it is shaped to find: it will catch an email address reliably and it cannot know that one name in a paragraph is the one that matters. Use the patterns for the mechanical things, type the specific words yourself, and read the result before you send it anywhere.

Does my file leave my device?

Yes. Rasterising a page and rebuilding the PDF is not something a browser can do to a hundred-page document, so the file is uploaded, processed and deleted 24 hours later. No account is needed and nothing is kept beyond that.

Are the document properties cleared too?

Always, on this tool, whether or not you asked. A redacted document whose author field still names the person being protected has not been redacted.

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