Smart Redact

Before releasing documents publicly or sharing them with external parties, you need to permanently remove social security numbers, financial data, medical details, or personal names. Highlighting text in black with a drawing tool is not redaction — the underlying text is still there, selectable and searchable. A recipient who copies and pastes from such a document gets the original text. True redaction removes the data at the source. Dokk.ai's redaction tool performs proper PDF redaction: it identifies the content you mark for removal, overwrites it with solid black rectangles, and strips the underlying text data from the file. The result is a document where the redacted content cannot be recovered by any PDF tool, copy-paste operation, or screen reader. What you see is what the file contains. Marking content for redaction is fast. Search for a term — a name, an account number, a specific phrase — and the tool highlights every occurrence across the whole document. Approve all matches or deselect specific ones before applying. For manual redaction, click and drag to draw redaction boxes over any area including images, logos, or handwritten content. Mixed-mode redaction (search-based and manual) can be used in the same session. After applying redactions, you can customize the appearance: solid black fill is the standard, but some organisations use white fill or a specific color with a label such as [REDACTED] for compliance audit trails. All visual options still remove the underlying data. For documents that require additional security after redaction — such as FOIA releases or litigation productions — combine with the Encrypt PDF tool to add a password, or use Flatten to lock the visual layer permanently. Remove Annotations beforehand if the document contains review comments that should not appear in the released version. All processing is done server-side over TLS. Files are deleted after download and are never retained or indexed.