This actually deletes the content — it does not paint over it.A black box drawn by most tools (and most PDF viewers' own markup) leaves the original text sitting right underneath it — still selectable, copyable, and recoverable with a simple select-all. This tool cuts the marked area out of the page's underlying content before it draws the black box, the same technique government and legal redaction software uses. Your file is only ever handled in memory here, never written to our disk.
By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: August 2026
A name, an account number, a signature, a photo you need gone before you share a document. Drag a box over each thing to remove — on as many pages as you need — and press Redact. The marked areas are cut out of the file itself, not covered up, so there is nothing left underneath for anyone to select, copy or extract.
A PDF page is really two things layered together: the marks you see, and the underlying content — text runs, image data — that produced them. Drawing a black rectangle only adds a new mark on top; the content underneath is completely untouched and comes straight back out with copy-paste, "select all", or any text-extraction tool.
This tool marks each area for redaction and then applies it — a step that rewrites the page's content stream to actually remove what falls inside the box, before the black fill is drawn. What you download has nothing left to recover in the marked areas, on any page.
Blurring and pixelating are cosmetic filters applied to the existing pixels — several published cases have shown text recovered from a blurred image by reversing the filter. A solid black fill after the underlying content is removed leaves nothing to reverse: there is no blurred version of the text left anywhere in the file to work backwards from.
Your PDF is processed entirely in memory on our own machine and handed back in the response — it is never written to our disk for this tool, and nothing is kept afterwards.
Only need the metadata gone — author name, title, the hidden XMP copy? Remove PDF metadata does just that. Redacting a form you filled in? Flatten PDF bakes the field values in first so they can't be edited back out. Need the whole page trimmed instead of a specific area removed? Crop PDF handles margins. Handed two drafts of the same document and need to know exactly what changed before you decide what to redact? Compare PDF lines up the two versions and names every changed word. Just want to flag something for a colleague to look at, not cut it out for good? Annotate PDF highlights or notes it while leaving the content underneath untouched.
Drop the PDF in, drag a box over each thing you want gone on any page, then press Redact. The download has those areas cut out of the file itself.
It deletes it. Drawing a black rectangle over text leaves the original text sitting underneath, still selectable, copyable, and recoverable with any PDF tool or a simple select-all. This tool removes the marked content from the page's underlying data before drawing the black box — the same technique professional redaction software uses.
Yes. Drag as many boxes as you need, on any page, then press Redact once to apply all of them.
No — visually it is the same solid black rectangle. The difference is invisible until someone tries to select or extract the text: with this tool there is nothing left to select.
No. Only the areas you mark change. Everything else on the page keeps its original text, images and quality.
25 pages per file. There is no account, no watermark and no daily cap.