Redact PDF
Redact PDFWhat it's for: permanently remove sensitive content from a PDF: the content is actually gone, not just hidden.
- Select PDF: open a PDF file.
- Redact: draw black boxes over the areas you want permanently removed.
- Save: write the redacted PDF to disk.
This is the one tool in PaperOtter where "security over convenience" is the explicit design goal. Any page that has at least one redaction on it is rendered to an image and rebuilt as a picture: the black boxes are drawn directly onto that image before it's embedded as the new page. This means:
- Text on a redacted page is no longer selectable, searchable, or copyable, because it's a picture now, not text. There is nothing left underneath the black box to extract.
- Pages with no redactions are left completely untouched: copied over as-is, keeping their original selectable text.
This is a deliberate tradeoff. A redaction tool that just draws a black rectangle over live text (the way Watermark draws over content, or the way Crop PDF's crop box just hides content) doesn't actually delete anything: the "hidden" text is often still selectable, copyable, or extractable by anyone who knows to try. PaperOtter's Redact avoids that failure mode entirely by flattening the page.
Since redacted pages become images, very fine text or thin lines can look marginally softer than the vector-rendered text on unredacted pages, especially if you zoom in. That's the cost of true redaction: it's rendered at high quality specifically to keep this difference minimal, but a rendered image will never be pixel-identical to vector text.
Double-check the black box actually fully covers the sensitive area on that exact page before saving: a box that's slightly misaligned, or a redaction placed on the wrong page, won't remove content it doesn't cover. Once saved, though, whatever is under a redaction box is genuinely gone from that output file.
See also: Crop PDF