Question 1

Is the text underneath really gone?

Accepted Answer

This tool rasterizes each affected page through a re-render pipeline: the page is rendered to an image, the black bars are burned in at pixel level, then the page becomes an image-only page in the new PDF. Text behind the bars is gone — not just hidden. The trade-off: the affected pages lose their text layer entirely (no longer searchable / selectable).

Question 2

How does this differ from drawing a black box on top?

Accepted Answer

Drawing a vector black box (what most online tools do) leaves the text underneath intact — a determined viewer can extract it by copy-paste or by removing the rectangle in Acrobat. This tool burns the redaction into pixels, so the text is genuinely destroyed.

PDF Redact

How this is different from "drawing a black rectangle"

Trade-off: redacted pages lose searchability

For sensitive documents

Privacy