White out text in a PDF
Cover a mistake, an old date or a stale address with an opaque white box, then type the correction on top. Free, private, no upload.
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Drag an opaque white box over anything that should disappear visually, then type the replacement on top. Everything happens in this browser tab — you can turn off your network connection first and it will still work.
Cover and retype, in four steps
- Drop the PDF in and find the page with the mistake.
- Drag a white box over the wrong text. Make it slightly taller than the line so no descenders peek out below.
- Switch to the Text tool, click just inside the box and type the replacement.
- Nudge with the arrow keys until the new text sits on the same baseline as its neighbours, then apply and download.
Zoom to 200% before the final nudge. At 100% a two-point misalignment is invisible on screen and glaring on paper.
White-out is not redaction — this matters
A white box is opaque ink painted on top of the page. The characters underneath are still in the content stream. Anyone can select the covered area, copy it, run PDF to Text over the file, or open it in a text extractor and read what you thought you had removed. Newspapers, law firms and government departments have all published documents this way and had the "hidden" text pulled out within hours.
Use white-out for corrections: a wrong date, an old office address, a typo in a name, a superseded figure. If the covered text is something that must not be recoverable — a salary, a witness, a national insurance number, a bank account — Redact PDF is the tool you need. It rebuilds the affected pages as images so the words genuinely cease to exist in the file.
Matching a background that is not white
Scanned paper is almost never pure white. It is cream, or grey, or has a faint blue tint from the scanner's colour profile, and a #FFFFFF patch on top of it looks like a sticker.
| Background | Try | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Digital PDF, pure white page | #FFFFFF | Invisible, the easy case |
| Warm scan of ordinary paper | #FBF8F1 | Adjust with the custom colour picker until the edge disappears |
| Grey photocopy | #F1F1F0 | Extend the box to a natural boundary, such as a table cell |
| Coloured form field | Sample the fill colour | A slightly larger box aligned to the field's own border reads best |
On a heavily textured or shadowed scan, no flat colour will blend perfectly. In that case make the patch obviously deliberate — align it to a ruled line or a cell edge — rather than trying and failing to hide it.
Getting the layering right
Objects are painted in the order you created them, so a white box added after your replacement text will cover the text. If that happens, select the text and press Bring to front; it moves to the end of the paint order. The habit that avoids the problem entirely is: box first, text second.
The same rule applies when you are covering several lines. Drag one box for the whole block rather than several overlapping ones — overlapping opaque rectangles are indistinguishable on screen but produce more objects than the page needs.
When the whole page needs replacing
If more than a few lines are wrong, covering them stops being sensible. Two better routes: delete the page with Delete Pages and merge in a corrected page exported from your word processor; or, if the document originated as a form, fill a fresh copy with Fill Out PDF Forms. Both give a cleaner document than a page covered in patches.
Questions
Is white-out the same as redaction?
No, and confusing the two leaks documents. A white box is opaque ink drawn on top; the text underneath is still in the file and can be selected, copied or pulled out by any extraction tool. That is fine for fixing a typo and completely unsafe for hiding a name or an account number. For that, use Redact PDF, which rebuilds the affected pages as images with the words genuinely gone.
Why not just delete the text?
Because PDF has no concept of "the text" as an editable object — each character is placed at fixed coordinates inside a compressed content stream, often out of reading order and often split mid-word. Removing one phrase reliably would mean re-laying out the page. Covering and retyping produces a correct-looking, correctly-printing document with no risk of scrambling the rest of it.
The page has a coloured or scanned background — will a white box show?
Yes, a pure white box on off-white scanned paper is visible. Use the colour picker to sample the page background instead: pick a matching cream or grey with the custom colour control and the patch disappears. On heavily textured scans, a slightly larger box that lines up with an existing margin looks tidier than an exact-fit patch.
Does the correction print properly?
Yes. The box and your replacement text are ordinary page content, drawn in the order you added them, so they print exactly as they appear on screen. Draw the box first, then type on top — objects are painted in the order they were created, and "Bring to front" fixes it if you get them the wrong way round.