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Permanently remove sensitive content from PDFs before sharing.
Permanently remove sensitive content from PDFs before sharing.
Most PDF 'redaction' tools — including simple annotation editors — draw a black rectangle over text as a visual overlay. The original text data remains in the PDF's content stream and can be recovered by: selecting all text with Ctrl+A, running a text extraction tool (pdftotext, PyPDF2), removing the black box layer in Acrobat, or searching the file with a PDF parser. PDFWix uses a different approach: rasterisation. When you redact and download, PDFWix converts the affected page to a flat image at the resolution of the original. The text layer is destroyed — replaced by pixels. A black rectangle is then drawn on the pixel image. The result is that no underlying text data exists in the downloaded PDF; there is nothing to extract, select, or recover. This is the same principle used by…
**Legal firms:** Redacting privileged information before disclosing documents in litigation (FOIA requests, eDiscovery). Courts increasingly require that redacted PDFs genuinely remove data, not simply obscure it. **Healthcare providers:** Redacting patient names, dates of birth, and diagnosis codes before sharing records externally. HIPAA requires that PHI (Protected Health Information) is permanently removed, not just hidden. **HR departments:** Removing salary information, personal ID numbers, or disciplinary records from documents shared with employees or external parties under GDPR's data minimisation principle. In 2025–2026, GDPR enforcement reached record levels — EU regulators issued fines exceeding €7.1 billion in total, with single penalties reaching €530 million. For…
Real redaction. PDFWix removes the underlying text and images from the PDF stream — they're gone, not covered. Search and copy-paste won't recover them. Drawing a black shape with Edit PDF is visual cover-up only and is not safe for sensitive data.
Use the 'find text' field. Type the string (an email, SSN, name) and PDFWix redacts every occurrence across the whole document in one pass. Much safer than scanning a long file by eye.
PDFWix scrubs metadata (author, original filename, creation history, comments) automatically on export. These are common leak sources — a redacted PDF that still says 'Author: Jane Doe, original_draft_v3.docx' defeats the point.
Open the redacted file, try to copy/paste from a redacted area (you should get nothing or only black-box characters), and use Ctrl+F to search for the redacted strings (no results). Both checks should fail before you share the file.
No — true redaction is destructive by design. Always work from a copy and keep your original PDF as a master so you can re-redact differently if needed.
No. Redaction runs entirely in your browser — the sensitive file never reaches our server, which is the whole point of redacting it in the first place.
Yes. PDFWix rasterises the redacted pages — converting them to flat images — so the original text data in the PDF content stream is destroyed. You can verify this by opening the downloaded PDF and pressing Ctrl+A to select all text: text under the redaction box will not be selectable.
PDFWix uses rasterisation to permanently remove underlying text data, which meets the technical requirement for data removal under GDPR and HIPAA. However, compliance also depends on how you handle and store the document. For regulated disclosures, always verify the output file and consult your compliance officer.
Open PDFWix Redact PDF in any browser — no Adobe Acrobat, no software installation, no account needed. Upload your PDF, draw black boxes over the text or images you want to remove, click Apply redactions, and download. PDFWix uses rasterisation to permanently destroy the underlying data — not just a visual overlay. The redacted content cannot be recovered by selecting, copying, or text extraction tools. Works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, and Android.