How to Redact a PDF on Mac (Free, Without Acrobat)
Permanently black out sensitive text and images in a PDF on Mac in Safari or Chrome — no Adobe Acrobat Pro, no subscription.
Adobe Acrobat Pro's redaction tool costs $22+/month. Mac's Preview can draw black rectangles over text, but this doesn't truly redact — the text remains in the file. FixMyPDF's redaction tool performs true permanent redaction for free in Safari or Chrome on Mac.
Why Preview's Black Shapes Don't Count as Redaction
In Preview, you can draw a filled black rectangle over sensitive text using the Shapes tool. But this adds the rectangle as an annotation layer on top of the PDF — the underlying text is still there, selectable and copyable by anyone who removes or moves the rectangle. True redaction removes the underlying content.
Open the Redact Tool in Safari or Chrome
Go to fixmypdf.in/tools/redact in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox on your Mac. Upload your PDF. The tool displays each page with selection handles.
Draw Redaction Areas
Click and drag to draw redaction boxes over sensitive content. You can draw multiple boxes across multiple pages. The boxes show a preview of the redacted area before you apply — hover over a box to see the content that will be removed.
Apply and Download
Click "Apply Redactions" — the content under each box is permanently removed. The tool renders the page without the underlying content and replaces the area with a solid black fill in the page content layer (not an annotation). Download the redacted PDF.
Verifying Permanent Redaction on Mac
In the downloaded PDF, open it in Preview and try to select text in the redacted area. If true redaction was applied, no text will be selectable there — the text doesn't exist in the file. If text appears selectable, the redaction wasn't permanent. Our tool's redaction is permanent by design.
Mac Legal and Compliance Use Cases
Lawyers on Mac redact client names, case numbers, and identifying information before filing public documents. Healthcare providers redact patient data before sharing for research. HR departments redact salary information before sharing org charts. All these workflows benefit from free browser-based redaction on Mac.
Complete Document Sanitisation
After redacting visible content, use our metadata remover to strip hidden document metadata (author, company name, comments, revision history) that might identify the source. Then compress for sharing. Three tools, all free.
Try Redact PDF Now — Free
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