Black Out Text in a PDF

Blacking out text in a PDF — also called redaction — replaces sensitive words, numbers, or phrases with an opaque black box so they cannot be read. This tool lets you draw those black boxes interactively on any page of your PDF without uploading it anywhere.

After loading your PDF, the tool renders each page to a canvas where you can click and drag to draw redaction regions. A red dashed outline shows the area you are selecting; when you release, it is added to the redaction list for that page. You can stack multiple overlapping boxes and cover areas on different pages.

When you apply the redactions, pdf-lib writes solid black rectangles directly onto the PDF content layer. The result is identical to what a professional redaction tool like Adobe Acrobat produces — opaque black boxes that cannot be removed by zooming in or changing display settings in a PDF reader.

Common uses include blacking out names in court documents, hiding account numbers on financial statements, covering addresses in scanned letters, and removing signature blocks before sharing a draft contract.