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Redact PDF

Permanently purge sensitive text, social security numbers, and coordinates from PDF streams.

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Step-by-Step Guide

How to use Redact PDF

1

Upload your PDF

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Select the PDF containing content you want to redact.

2

Select areas to redact

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Draw redaction boxes over sensitive text or images on each page.

3

Choose redaction style

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Select black boxes (standard), white boxes, or custom colour fills.

4

Apply redactions

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Click "Redact". The selected areas are permanently removed from the document.

5

Download the redacted PDF

5/5

Save the sanitised document.

Best Practices

Pro Tips

Tip 1

Always verify redactions by opening the output PDF and attempting to copy-paste or search for the redacted text.

Tip 2

Redact metadata as well as content — document properties (author, title, comments) may contain sensitive information. Use the Privacy Risk Scanner to identify metadata.

Tip 3

Do not rely on visual covering (white rectangles) for sensitive redaction — always use proper redaction tools that remove content from the file structure.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

When using PDFolio's redaction (which removes content from the document structure), recovery is not possible through normal PDF tools. We strongly recommend verifying by searching for the redacted text in the output file.

No. Only the specifically selected areas are affected. The rest of the page content remains intact.

Yes. Drawn redaction boxes cover any content including images. The image data in the redacted area is removed from the PDF structure.