Why a black box on top is not enough
A PDF page is built in layers. Drawing a rectangle in an editor, or highlighting text in black, adds a new layer on top of the words; the words themselves stay in the file. Copy and paste, the search box of any PDF reader, a screen reader or a text extractor still read them, and anyone can move or delete the rectangle. Real redaction means the characters under the box are no longer stored anywhere in the document. That is the job this tool does: it does not hide text, it replaces the marked page with a new one that never contained it.
What happens to your file
Each page that has at least one box is drawn in your browser at 150 or 300 dots per inch, the boxes are painted into that picture in solid black, and the picture becomes the new page. The text, fonts and hidden layers of the old page are left behind, so the text you marked is gone, and the rest of the text on that page can no longer be selected or searched either. Pages without boxes are copied as they are and keep their selectable text. The new file also leaves out the document title, author, subject and keywords, the XMP metadata, bookmarks, attached files, scripts, page thumbnails, comments and other annotations, and the form itself: filled-in fields on unchanged pages are kept as plain printed content. Because image pages are larger than text, the file can grow, especially at 300 dpi.
Search presets for Gulf documents
Emirates ID numbers have 15 digits, as the UAE government portal u.ae explains, and they start with 784, the UAE's country number; the preset finds them with or without dashes or spaces. IBANs are found for the UAE (23 characters), Saudi Arabia (24), Qatar (29), Kuwait (30), Bahrain (22) and Oman (23), the lengths published in the IBAN registry, written in one block or in groups of four. Phone numbers are found in international form (+ or 00 with any country code, such as +971 or +966) and as local Gulf numbers that start with 0 or 800. Email addresses, passport-style numbers (one or two capital letters followed by 6 to 9 digits) and card numbers that pass the standard check-digit test complete the list. Presets look for patterns, so they can also mark a number that only looks like an ID: review every box before you redact.
Arabic, scanned pages and forms
Arabic search ignores tashkeel and tatweel, treats alef with hamza or madda as plain alef, ta marbuta as ha and alef maqsura as ya, and turns the shaped letter forms some PDFs store back into normal letters, so a name typed without hamza still finds the spelling in the file. Arabic and Persian digits match 0 to 9, so an Emirates ID written in Arabic-Indic digits is found too. Because joined Arabic letters have no fixed widths, a match inside an Arabic line is covered word by word with a wider margin, and a match inside a line that mixes Arabic with English or numbers may cover the whole line; the preview shows exactly what will be blacked out. A scanned page is a picture with no text layer, so search cannot see it: draw boxes over the private parts by hand. Values typed into form fields are searched too, and a matching field is covered whole.
Check before you share, and honest limits
When the file is ready, the tool opens it again and checks that the image pages hold no text and that none of the marked texts appear anywhere in it. Do your own check as well: open the download, try to select the text under a box, and search for one of the hidden numbers. Keep the original in a safe place, because redaction cannot be undone. This tool removes what you mark; deciding what must be hidden, and whether a document meets a law or a contract, stays with you. Files up to 100 MB work on most computers. A password-protected PDF is opened with its password on your device, and the redacted copy has no password, so you can add one with Protect PDF.