Draw around an area and deal with what is inside it. Three strengths — only two of them actually delete anything. The difference is below; please read it before choosing.
Drag a box, or draw freehand around an irregular shape.
Pick the strength, confirm, and download.
This one needs an upload, and is deleted afterwards
Browsers cannot do this calculation, so the file goes to our server. It is deleted automatically 60 minutes after the job finishes, and the working copy lives in a memory filesystem that is wiped whenever the server restarts.
We do not log file names and do not log file contents — that is a hard rule in our engineering standards, not a setting.
What it does — and what it doesn't
Cover only: a block of colour is drawn over it and the text is still in the file — copy and paste brings it back. A warning comes with every job. Only suitable for printing.
Erase: the text inside the area is removed from the content stream; the rest stays vector and searchable. This is what most people want.
Rasterise: the whole file is redrawn as images. Most thorough, but the text layer is gone everywhere and the file grows.
The block is drawn into the page content, not added as an annotation — an annotation can simply be deleted to reveal what is underneath.
Vector graphics are not path-clipped. Use rasterise if a drawing must go too.
Common questions
How do I know I picked the right one?
Open the result and try to select the covered area. If text comes out, you chose "cover only".
How is this different from Auto-redact?
That one finds numbers for you; this one is you drawing the boxes. Use both — run the automatic pass, then draw around whatever it could not detect.
Does it work on scans?
Rasterise will black out the area. Erase does nothing on a scan, because there is no text layer to remove from.
