Whiteout PDF

Whiteout hides; it does not delete

A whiteout box is an opaque shape drawn over the page, exactly like a strip of correction tape on paper. It changes what people see when they look at the page, and that is the whole of what it changes. The text or image underneath is still in the file: it can be selected by dragging across the area, found with the reader's search, copied out and pasted elsewhere, and recovered by any tool that removes or ignores the box.

That is perfectly fine for the jobs whiteout is normally used for: tidying a template before reusing it, blanking out a field so it can be filled in again, removing a stray mark, covering a placeholder before typing the real value. It is not fine for anything you need to keep from the recipient. Names, account numbers, salaries, addresses and medical details covered with white are still sitting in the document, and people who receive PDFs do find them.

For confidential content use Redact PDF, which removes everything under the marked areas from the page, so there is nothing left to select or recover. For changing printed wording, use Edit text, which removes the original characters of the line you edit and sets your new text in their place.

Matching the page, not just painting it white

Plenty of documents are not white: forms with grey or pastel field backgrounds, letterheads printed on cream, scans whose paper came out slightly yellow. A pure-white rectangle on those looks like a patch. Select a whiteout box and pick its colour to match the page — the colour picker can be set to any value, and a little matching makes a correction disappear.

Whiteout boxes have no border and are drawn at full opacity, so nothing shows through. They are saved as vector shapes in the PDF, which means they stay crisp at any zoom and add only a few bytes to the file. They sit above the page content and below anything you add after them, so you can white out a field and then type on top of it, and the new text is never hidden by the box beneath it.

Common uses

Reusing a filled form: white out last year's answers and type this year's. Correcting a typo in a printed letter you cannot regenerate: white out the word and type the right one in a matching font and size, or better, use Edit text on that line so the old word is removed rather than covered. Preparing a worksheet: hide the answers on an answer key to produce a blank version for students. Cleaning up a scan: cover hole-punch shadows, staples and handwritten scribbles in the margins.

For scans in particular, whiteout is often the only practical tool, since a scan has no text layer — it is a photograph of a page — and covering is the natural way to correct a photograph. If you then want the scan to be searchable, run it through OCR afterwards.

Privacy of the tool itself

The documents people white out are frequently the ones they would least like to upload: tax forms, contracts, statements. This tool never uploads them. The PDF is opened in your browser, the boxes are drawn into it on your device, and the result is offered as a download. Nothing about your file is sent to a server, because there is no server doing the work.