Redact a PDF
Draw over what must not be read. The covered content is destroyed, not hidden.
Save your favourite tools
Create a free iBuildPDF account to keep your favourite tools and find them quickly anytime.
Free account. The PDF tools themselves never need one.
This tool rebuilds each page as an image. That is what makes the change permanent — but it also means the text in the result is no longer selectable or searchable. If you need the text to stay live, use a tool from the Edit family instead.
Select a PDF file
or drag and drop here
Accepted formats: PDF
Processing…
Quick facts
- What it does
- Permanently removes the content under the areas you mark, then rebuilds the page so it cannot be recovered.
- Input
- Output
- Processing
- In your browser
- Files uploaded?
- No
- Account required?
- No
- Best for
- Removing names, account numbers or addresses before a document is shared or filed.
- Main limitation
- Redacted pages are rebuilt as images, so text elsewhere on those pages is no longer selectable. Always check the result before sharing it.
How to use this tool
- Upload your PDF.
- Draw black boxes over anything that must not be readable.
- Review every page — redaction cannot be undone afterwards.
- Download the redacted PDF.
Why use iBuildPDF
The most common redaction failure in the world is a black rectangle drawn on top of text that is still in the file — copy, paste, and the "redacted" name is right there. It has embarrassed governments, law firms and newspapers. This tool does not work that way.
How it works
Each redacted page is rendered to a flat image with your boxes painted onto it, and that image becomes the page. The original text objects are not copied into the output at all, so there is no layer left to remove and nothing to select.
Frequently asked questions
Can the text under the black box be recovered?
Not from the file this tool produces. The page is rebuilt from pixels and the text objects are never written into the output, so there is no hidden layer to recover. Verify it yourself: open the result and try to select the redacted area.
Why does the whole page become an image?
Because selectively deleting text objects while leaving the rest live is exactly where other tools get it wrong — the removed text often survives in an embedded font, a content stream or the document index. Rebuilding the page removes that entire class of mistake.
Does it also remove the document properties?
Not automatically — the author name, title and creation date live outside the page. Run the result through Remove PDF Metadata if those matter, which is why the two are offered as a workflow.
Can redacted text be recovered?
Not when the redaction covers real text. Drawing a black rectangle over words — which is what many people do in a PDF editor — hides them visually while leaving the characters underneath, still selectable and still copy-pasteable by anyone who tries. This tool deletes the text objects from the page's content stream, so once you download the file the words are genuinely no longer in it.
Does redaction work on a scanned document?
No, and this is an important limitation. Removing text only works where there is real, selectable text to remove. A scan or a photo saved as a PDF is a picture of a page, with no text objects behind it, so there is nothing for the tool to delete. Sensitive content in a scan has to be removed from the image itself before it becomes a PDF.
Is redacting enough on its own?
It handles the page content, which is the part black boxes leave exposed — but a PDF carries more than what you can see. Author name, the software that produced it, revision dates and sometimes embedded thumbnails all sit in the file's metadata. Running the result through Remove PDF Metadata afterwards closes that second gap, and takes a few seconds.
Read more about this
Continue with your PDF
Your file is ready. These are the things people usually do next.