Redact a PDF

Removed. The words under each box are taken out of the file, so they cannot be selected, copied or found by a search. The covered part of a picture is blanked, and a link or note under a box is deleted. The finished file is also written again from scratch, because a PDF can carry an earlier copy of a page inside it. Then it is read back and every value you removed is searched for.

No. It finds values with a clear shape: emails, phone numbers, card numbers, ID numbers, bank accounts, dates, web and IP addresses. A name or a street has no shape, so type it in and every spelling of it, in any case, is found on every page.

A scan is a picture with no text to search. Read the scanned pages first and the same search works on them; the covered pixels of the picture are blanked. Reading scans is only as good as the scan, so look at the result.

Finding values happens in this browser tab. To take the content out, the file is sent to our server over an encrypted connection, and the copy there is deleted as soon as the result is sent back. It is up to 25 MB.

The document's details such as author and title, any attached files and the bookmarks are not carried into the new file. Comments and form-field values are removed too unless you turn that off.

Not in the file you download. Keep the original, because a redaction is meant to be permanent.