Redact a PDF, free and private.

1. 01

   Open your PDF

   Open the editor and choose your PDF, or drop it on the page. It opens in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.

2. 02

   Choose the Redact tool

   Choose Redact, then drag across what has to go. A mark over words snaps to the lines it covers, so you mark meaning rather than pixels.

3. 03

   Apply the marks

   Nothing is removed while you are still marking. Applying is the step that rewrites the document and deletes the content underneath.

4. 04

   Read the report and download

   The report says what was removed and what was refused, in the engine's own words. Download the redacted PDF when you are satisfied.

No. A black or white patch laid over words only hides them on screen. The text is still in the file, and anyone who copies it, searches it or opens the raw bytes can read it. Real redaction deletes the content itself, permanently. In Pandaedits the marks you draw are only a request, and applying them is what removes the text for good.

This is how redactions fail in public, and it is why this tool never offers to save a document with the marks still on it. A mark is a request. The removal is a separate, deliberate step, and until you take it nothing has been redacted.

Most often because redaction is not in the version you have: Acrobat only offers it in Pro, not in Standard and not in the free Reader. When it is there but the Apply button stays grey, the usual causes are a document that has already been digitally signed, or one locked with a permissions password. Pandaedits has no paid tier to reach, and asks for a permissions password when the document sets one.

• Reader and Standard do not have it. Redaction is an Acrobat Pro feature, behind a subscription once the trial ends. Nothing is wrong with your file.
• The document is already signed. A signature locks what it covers, so removing content afterwards would break it. That is the signature doing its job.
• It is locked with a permissions password. The document forbids changes until the password is given.
• The advice you will be given is bad. Forum answers suggest printing the file to a new PDF to flatten it, or exporting to Word and back. Both destroy the text layer and can leave the original data in place.

• The text is rewritten out

  The page's content is rebuilt without the characters you marked. They are gone, not covered.

• Images and drawings too

  An image your mark fully covers is removed, and vector paths crossing the area go with it.

• Font traces scrubbed

  Metadata left behind by the rewrite is cleaned up, so a removed name cannot be inferred from it.

• Checked by reopening

  The result is reopened as a fresh document and searched for anything that should have gone.

• Rolled back on doubt

  If a survivor is found, the whole redaction is undone rather than handing you a file you would trust wrongly.

• Refusals are shown

  Anything it could not safely remove is named in the report instead of being quietly skipped.

• It refuses rather than guesses. A partly covered image, ambiguous text, or a drawing shared with other pages is refused by name. A tool that hid those behind "Done" would be telling you something it does not know.
• Applying is not undone by accident. Removal is one step on the same undo history as your other edits, but the point of redaction is that the saved file no longer contains the words.
• Check the report before you send it. It lists what went and what did not. The refusals are the part worth reading.
• Protected and signed PDFs are respected. A PDF that restricts changes asks for its permissions password first. A digitally signed one warns you that redacting it will invalidate the signature.