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Redact PDF

Personal data found and painted over — in the pixels, not hidden under a box.

More free conversions, where you upload. The Fylane extension does the same work inside any upload form, on its own free share every day.About the extension

How to redact PDF

  1. Drop the PDF.
  2. Tick the kinds of data to black out.
  3. Press Redact and download.

What happens to your file

Every page is read — the text layer, or OCR for a scan — the matches are located on the page, and each is painted over in the pixels of a re-rendered page. The words are gone from the file, not covered: nothing underneath can be selected, searched or copied.

Because pages are re-rendered, text elsewhere on them is no longer selectable either; run OCR PDF on the result if you need it searchable again.

The result says how many boxes were painted and of which kinds; when nothing matched, the document is handed back unchanged and the page says so.

Questions

Is this safer than drawing a black box in a PDF editor?

Yes. A drawn box is a layer over intact text — the text can still be copied out. Here the page is rasterised with the box in it; the text no longer exists in the file.

Will it find names?

Not by this method: names have no shape. Emails, numbers, IDs, dates and amounts do. A names pass with a language model is on the list.

Do this in code

curl -X POST https://api.fylane.dev/v1/jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FYLANE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "file_id": "<file id>",
    "operation": "redact",
    "options": {
      "kinds": "email,phone,credit_card,iban,ssn"
    }
  }'

The same operation, redact — Remove, not cover: text masks in place; images and PDFs are rebuilt from pixels with the findings painted out — no text layer to leak. Upload first with the quickstart; every option is on the operations page. 500 free credits a month, then $5 per thousand.