Whiteout PDF

No — whiteout hides content, it does not remove it. The tool draws a solid white rectangle into the page on top of what is already there, and the original text, images and vector data underneath stay exactly where they were in the file. Anyone can select the covered text and copy it, pull it out with a text-extraction tool, or find it with a search box, and any process that reads the content stream instead of rendering the page will see it plainly. That is why the card carries an amber warning above the preview. For anything sensitive — personal data, salary figures, names in a document you are about to publish — use Redact PDF in Wipe mode, which rebuilds the affected pages so the covered content is genuinely gone rather than merely painted over.

Whiteout is right when the goal is presentation; redaction is right when the goal is secrecy. Covering a stale price on a quote you are reissuing, blanking a letterhead so a scanned form can be reused, tidying a stray pen mark out of a scan or hiding a field before printing are all jobs where nobody is trying to recover what was underneath, and whiteout is faster while leaving the rest of the page's text layer searchable. The moment recovered content would cause harm — identity details, medical or financial data, anything under a legal duty — the answer is Redact PDF in Wipe mode. Wipe rebuilds the affected pages as images, which removes the underlying text but also makes those pages non-searchable; that trade-off is the price of real removal.

Rectangles here are draw-and-redo: there are no resize handles and no dragging to reposition. Each box gets a small round trash button at its top-right corner in the preview, which deletes just that box, and "Clear this page" removes every box on the page you are looking at. The counter beneath the preview shows how many are on the current page and how many exist across the whole document, so nothing gets lost while you work through a file. Boxes are tracked per page — move around with the pager and draw more; pages you never mark are written out completely untouched. A drag shorter than a hair is discarded rather than turned into a sliver of a box, so a stray click leaves nothing behind.

The rectangle is filled with pure white, so it vanishes on a white page and stands out on anything else. Over a cream scan, a tinted form or a page with a coloured background, a white patch will read as an obvious patch — it will look like correction fluid, because that is precisely what it is. There is no colour picker in this tool, so a cover that blends into a tinted background is not something it can produce; if you want a black box instead, Redact PDF offers a Cover mode that draws one. In the preview every saved box is outlined with a thin grey line so it stays visible against white paper while you work — that outline is a working aid only and is not written into the downloaded file.

The PDF never leaves your device. It is read from disk by the browser, each page is rendered locally so you can drag boxes over it, the rectangles are stamped into the document in the same tab, and the copy is saved straight to your downloads with a -whiteout suffix. Nothing is uploaded at any point — the only sane arrangement for a tool whose entire purpose is hiding something — and the fact that you covered a particular area is not recorded anywhere outside the file itself. Bear in mind, though, that local processing protects the document on its way to us; it does not change what remains readable inside the file you hand on to somebody else.

It is free, with no account, no page limit and no paid tier. The tool is deliberately narrow as well: only the rectangles you drew are added, and page size, rotation, the existing page content, form fields and bookmarks are all preserved, so the output is an ordinary PDF that opens anywhere. No watermark, logo or credit line is added by PDFChamp. Pages you never drew on are left exactly as they were. The download is named with a -whiteout suffix so your source file stays intact in the folder — worth keeping, because a box that lands slightly wrong is easier to fix by starting again from the original than by covering the cover.