Redact, extract images, number pages: 3 new PDF tools

Redact a PDF: hide information for real

In January 2019, lawyers for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, filed a court document with several passages blacked out. Except the blacked-out passages were only black boxes laid over the text. Journalists selected them, copied and pasted, and read what they hid: Manafort had shared 2016 campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate the FBI assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence.

The mistake is nothing unusual. In many PDF editors, a black box covers the text without removing it from the file. On screen, everything looks hidden. In the file, everything is still there.

Visual PDF's new Redact PDF tool was built so this kind of accident cannot happen.

Select text or draw a box

Select a word, a line or a paragraph as if you were about to copy it. For a signature, a stamp or an ID photo, draw a box anywhere on the page. On a phone, a long press does the same.

Search and automatic detection

Redacting one number on one page is easy. Finding every occurrence of a name in a forty-page report is where one slips through. "Search the document" finds a word or phrase anywhere in the file, and the "Emails", "Phone numbers", "Card numbers" and "IBANs" shortcuts pick up that data in one go.

Nothing turns black without your say. Every match is listed, you tick what has to go, then you click "Confirm".

The content is removed, not just covered

Text and images under a black box are removed from the source file. There is no way to recover the data later. Visual PDF goes further: before handing you the document, the tool reads it back to check it. If anything under a box is still readable, the tool raises an error and refuses to go on, so you can be sure you are not about to send a file that leaks sensitive data. Of course, this is a last-resort safeguard.

The new tool also removes what you cannot see on the page: metadata (title, author, dates), thumbnails, attachments and earlier versions of the file.

Why local processing matters here

A tool built to hide data should not need to receive it. When an online service processes the file on its server, it gets the whole document, unredacted, before the first black box is even drawn. Wanting to hide data then turns into a risk of its own: your file, unredacted, ends up on the server of a company you do not know, that you may have no reason to trust, and that could itself be hacked and have the documents it temporarily stores stolen. Your sensitive document included.

On Visual PDF, the PDF is opened, redacted and saved directly in your browser. It never leaves your device. And that makes all the difference for keeping your data safe.

Redact a PDF

Drop your file, mark what has to go, download the result.

Drop your file here

Browse files

Image extraction: get your photos and graphics back

Sometimes you need a photo from a PDF, not the PDF. A screenshot gives you a blurry, badly framed image. The Extract images from PDF tool pulls out the images themselves, exactly as they are stored in the document.

Every image spotted at a glance

Open a PDF and each image appears framed where it sits on the page. You choose by looking at the layout, not by guessing from a list of file names.

Photos come out without being re-encoded, so with no quality loss: you get the file that was inside the PDF.

Extract only some of them

Click an image to deselect it. "Select all" and "Clear selection" help when there are many. Then click "Finish" and save each image separately, or all at once in a ZIP file.

Handy for pulling the photos out of a report, the illustrations out of a catalog or the diagrams out of course notes.

Extract images from a PDF

Drop your PDF, keep the images you want, download them.

Drop your file here

Browse files

Page numbering: fits whatever you need

Numbering a PDF seems simple until the cover page should not count, the document is going to be printed double-sided, or the number overlaps an existing footer. The Add page numbers to PDF tool handles those cases too.

Live preview and draggable numbers

Each number is drawn on the page exactly as it will appear in the final file. If it gets in the way, drag it: it snaps to the margins and the middle of the page, and every other page follows.

Two modes: fixed position or facing pages

In fixed position, the number sits in the same spot on every page. With "Facing pages", it moves to the outer edge of each spread: on the right for right-hand pages, on the left for left-hand pages. Nothing ends up in the fold, where the binding would hide it.

Pages, starting point, format

"Page range" decides which pages get a number, and "First number" what the first one shows. So you can skip a cover page and still start at 1. The rest is set in the same place:

• a minimum number of digits, to show "001"
• a custom format, such as "Page 3 / 12"
• "Odd numbers only" or "Even numbers only"

Style

You can also change the size, color, font, opacity and background of the number, and the preview shows every change live.

Add page numbers to a PDF

Drop your PDF, place the number, download the numbered file.

Drop your file here

Browse files

Same approach as always, to keep your data safe

These three tools work like the rest of the Visual PDF suite. They are free and need no sign-up. There is no size limit, and they are fast for a simple reason: nothing is uploaded, so there is no upload to wait for before you see your document. They also chain with the other tools: merge several files before numbering them as one series, or compress the redacted PDF before emailing it.

I hope these tools are useful to you. If one of your files gets the better of them, I want to know! In the meantime, drop a PDF into any of the three and try it for yourself.