PDF redactor

Blacks out confidential regions in a PDF in a way that cannot be recovered by OCR or by selecting text under the black box. Most PDF viewers (including Adobe Acrobat) draw the black rectangle on top of the underlying text — the text still lives in the file, and selecting through the rectangle or running extract-tools reveals it intact. Journalists have exposed many redacted documents that leaked exactly this way. This tool works differently: every page is rendered to a canvas via pdf.js (Mozilla, Apache-2.0), the user draws black rectangles, and a new PDF is produced where every page is a JPEG image with the redaction already burned in. The result has no text layer at all — there is no selectable or copyable content inside the black areas because that content does not exist. The trade-off: the document is no longer selectable or searchable. This is stated explicitly before you commit. The PDF generator is built in (~150 lines, minimal PDF 1.4 with DCTDecode image XObjects per page); pdf.js is used only to render the input. For password-protected PDFs the tool shows a friendly notice and does not try to bypass the password. Processing happens in the browser, the file never leaves your device.