A common, expensive mistake: drawing a black rectangle over sensitive text in a PDF before publishing. The underlying text remains in the file's content stream — searchable, copyable, and recoverable. Real redaction physically deletes the underlying data. The New York Times, U.S. courts, and the federal government have all leaked confidential information this way. PDFKits Redact PDF does true redaction in your browser: select an area, click Redact, and the underlying text and image data are removed from the file's content stream — not just visually covered.
This tool is essential for legal discovery (witness names, financial details), medical records (patient identifiers, diagnoses), government documents (personal data, security details), and any business workflow involving confidential content. The redacted output is safe to share publicly — even forensic tools cannot recover the removed content because it physically no longer exists in the file.
Drop the file. PDFKits renders pages so you can locate the content to redact.
Drag rectangles over text, names, signatures, addresses, or any visual element. You can add multiple rectangles per page. Use the search box to find every occurrence of a specific word (e.g., a witness name) and bulk-select them all.
Click Redact. PDFKits removes the underlying content (text glyphs, image pixels) from the selected regions and replaces them with solid black rectangles. The output PDF is permanent — even sophisticated forensic analysis cannot recover the original content. Download the safe-to-share file.
Attorneys producing discovery must redact privileged content, witness identities, or unrelated personal information before producing. True redaction is mandatory — drawing black rectangles in Word or Acrobat without proper redaction has caused real bar-association sanctions.
Sharing a patient case study for research or training requires removing all PHI (names, MRNs, dates, geographic identifiers). PDFKits redacts these completely from the underlying file structure.
Government agencies responding to FOIA must redact personally identifiable information, ongoing investigation details, or trade secrets. True redaction is legally required.
Documents shared during due diligence often need confidential strategic details redacted before broader circulation. Real redaction prevents leaks during deal negotiation.
True redaction is a feature of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC ($19.99/month). Many "redaction" features in free tools just draw black rectangles — the underlying text remains and can be copy-pasted out of the file. PDFKits performs true content-stream redaction via pdf-lib in your browser. The original underlying text is physically removed from the output file. Free, no signup, no upload — which is critical because uploading a sensitive document to a remote redaction service defeats the entire purpose.
Yes. The underlying text and image data is removed from the file's content stream, not just visually covered. Forensic analysis cannot recover the original content.
Yes. Type the word in the search box, and PDFKits highlights every occurrence across all pages. Bulk-select them all and apply redaction in one operation.
PDFKits replaces the pixels in the selected area with solid black — the original image data outside the region is preserved.
Yes for image regions. For text inside scanned images, run our OCR PDF tool first to make the text recognizable, then redact.
Before applying: yes, deselect the rectangle. After applying: no — the redaction is permanent by design. Keep a backup of the unredacted source if you might need to redact differently later.
Yes, that's the entire purpose. The redacted content physically no longer exists in the output PDF.
Yes. Redacted regions appear as solid black rectangles in both screen and print views.