⬛ PDF300
Black out private parts of a PDF
A bank statement or a contract has to go out, but not every line on it. Cover what should not be read before you send it.
Open the toolRuns entirely in your browser. The file never leaves your device.
How it works
- Add the PDFDrop the file onto the page. It stays on your device — which matters most for exactly this kind of file.
- Draw over what should goDrag a black box over each part.
- DownloadSave the covered copy.
Questions
No. This tool runs in your browser with JavaScript, so the file never leaves your device. Once the page has loaded you can even go offline and it still works.
Neither. No account, no watermark on the output. The practical limit is your device memory — large scanned files use more of it.
Guide: redacting well
When you'd use this
A bank statement needed only to prove an address, a contract shared for one clause while the pricing stays private, a form with a national ID number that the recipient does not need — all of these need part of a page hidden before the file goes anywhere. Drawing a solid box over the sensitive area is the fastest way to prepare a document like that for sharing.
How it works
Drag over any area on the page preview to mark it; the box colour can be changed (black is the default and the clearest choice for most documents), and any box can be cleared from the current page if you draw it in the wrong place before saving. Work through the document page by page — the box list is kept per page, so marks on page 3 do not appear on page 5.
What "permanently burned in" means — and its limit
Once you save, a solid rectangle is drawn directly into the page content at the position and size you chose; it cannot be clicked, selected, or dragged away afterward the way an on-screen annotation could be. That is the sense in which it is permanent. It is important to understand what it does not do: the text or image that was originally underneath the box is not deleted from the file — it is only visually covered. Software that reads the file's raw content (an extraction tool, a different PDF viewer, or simply copying all text from the page) can still retrieve what was behind the box, because the underlying data is still present in the saved PDF. For a quick privacy pass before sending a file to someone who will only look at it normally, this is sufficient. For a document where the hidden information must be provably unrecoverable — a legal filing under a court redaction order, for instance — a black box drawn on top is not enough, and the safer approach is to redact and then flatten the page to an image (for example by exporting to image with PDF to Image and rebuilding the PDF with Image to PDF), which discards the underlying text entirely rather than just covering it.
More questions
With the right tool, possibly — see the limit explained above. If that risk matters for your document, flatten the page to an image after redacting rather than relying on the box alone.
No — boxes are drawn individually per page, since the sensitive area is rarely in the exact same position on every page of a scanned document.
Yes — the box is drawn on top of whatever is on the page, text or image, so it works the same way on a scan as on a text PDF.
Each file needs its own pass — boxes drawn on one PDF are not saved or reused automatically for the next one.