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Pro planRedact a PDF
True redaction that deletes the characters from the file instead of drawing a black box over them. The redaction itself runs entirely in your browser.
- Processed on your device
- No watermarks
- Included with Pro — $10/mo or $49/yr
Redact PDF runs on your device like every other tool — it just needs a Pro plan to unlock. See what Pro includes.
Overview
About Redact PDF
SwiftPDFEdit performs true redaction: the characters you redact are deleted from the PDF's content stream, and the black mark is drawn afterwards as a visual indication. That is the opposite of the far more common approach of drawing a black rectangle over the text and leaving the words underneath, fully intact and fully recoverable.
The distinction has ended careers. Black boxes drawn over live text have exposed the names of protected witnesses, unredacted settlement figures in court filings, and confidential terms in published contracts — every time, because the reader simply selected the page and copied the text out from under the rectangle, or ran a text-extraction tool over the file. If the characters are still in the document, the document is not redacted.
In the editor you pick the Redact tool and either double-click a block of text or drag a box around an area. The text engine identifies the text objects that fall inside your selection, removes those characters from the page's content stream, and the editor lays a black mark over the area so the redaction is visible to a human reader. Extract the text from the exported file afterwards and the redacted words are simply not there.
SwiftPDFEdit also keeps an honest separation between the two operations. The toolbar has a distinct “Black box (cover only)” tool for the times when you genuinely just want to hide something visually, and it is labelled as a cover-up. If the engine cannot remove the characters in a particular block — some PDF generators encode text in ways that cannot be safely rewritten — the editor tells you plainly that the area was covered rather than redacted, instead of letting you believe otherwise.
Two limits worth stating. Redaction removes text; it does not remove an image, so a photograph or a scanned page must be covered and then flattened, and a scan needs OCR before there is any text to remove at all. And redaction addresses page content — document metadata, attachments and other non-page data are separate. All of this runs in your browser, which is the only sane place to redact a document you are not allowed to share.
Step by step
How to redact a PDF
Open the SwiftPDFEdit editor
Go to swiftpdfedit.com/editor and sign in, then load the document you need to redact. It is read on your device and never uploaded.
Select the Redact tool
Choose “Redact (permanently remove text)” in the toolbar. It is deliberately separate from the black-box tool, which only covers.
Mark the text to remove
Double-click a block of text to redact it, or drag a box around an area to redact everything inside it.
Confirm what actually happened
The editor reports whether the characters were deleted from the file or only covered. Treat a cover-up notice as a warning, not a success.
Redact everything else you need to
Repeat across the document. Each redaction is a tracked step, so undo works normally if you mark the wrong area.
Export the redacted PDF
Click Export. Extract the text from the exported file to verify: the redacted words are no longer present anywhere in the document.
Questions
Redact PDF — frequently asked questions
A black box is paint on top of the page — the words remain in the file and can be recovered by copying, by text extraction or by a screen reader. SwiftPDFEdit deletes the characters from the content stream first, then marks the area, so there is nothing underneath to recover.
Open the exported PDF and select all, or run any text-extraction tool over it, and search for the redacted words. They will not appear, because they are no longer in the document.
A scan is an image, so there are no characters to delete — covering the area and flattening it on export is the correct approach there. If the scan has been through OCR, the recognised text layer can be redacted properly.
No. Redaction addresses text in the page content. Document metadata, embedded attachments and other non-page data are separate and are not stripped by this operation.
The editor tells you. Some PDF generators encode text in ways that cannot be rewritten safely; rather than pretend, we report that the area was covered rather than redacted so you can decide what to do about it.
No. Your file never leaves your device — all processing happens locally in your browser. Redaction is exactly the operation you should never hand to a server you do not control, which is why ours runs in your browser.
Yes, within the editing session — each redaction is a tracked step with normal undo. Once you export, the characters are gone from the exported file; keep your original if you may need it.
In-place editing of a document's original text is part of the full editor included with Pro ($10/month or $49/year). The Free plan covers the core tools and the editor's annotation features, with a limit of 3 tasks a day and 5 saved documents.
Keep going
Related tools
The rest of the 21-tool workshop — every one of them runs in the same tab, on the same device.
Your file stays exactly where it is
Create a free account and redact a PDF in the same tab you are reading this in. Nothing to install, nothing to upload.
Free plan: 5 saved documents, 3 tasks a day, no watermarks.