Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH
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Redact Before You Send

Black out your name, your address, or anyone else’s before a document leaves your hands. No email, no account, and the file stays on your device.

Granite State Report · Version 1.0 · October 4, 2026

Sending Granite State Report a record that carries your own name, a home address, a phone number, a case number, or a coworker’s name? Remove it first. This page does that, and it asks nothing of you to use it.

A black rectangle drawn in a PDF editor sits on top of the words; the words are still in the file, and anyone can select and copy them. This tool turns every page into a picture first, burns the black into the picture, and builds a new PDF out of those pictures. The text layer under the black is gone, and so is the file’s hidden information: author name, edit history, and the location a phone stores inside a photo. The copy you get back cannot be searched. That is the point.

Your document never leaves this page. Your own browser opens it, the black is burned in on your own machine, and the finished PDF goes to your downloads folder. Nothing you open here is uploaded to Granite State Report or anyone else. Two open-source code libraries load from cdnjs.cloudflare.com when the page opens; like any web request, that one carries your IP address, but not your file. The visit itself is counted like any page on this site, as the Privacy Policy describes.

Redact a document

1. Open a file

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PDF, PNG, or JPG. A phone photo of a page works. Only the first 50 pages of a PDF are loaded and saved; split a longer file and redact each part.

4. Send it

Drop the redacted copy in the box that fits. Every box takes any file type, and nothing has to be typed.

How to check that it worked

Do not take this tool’s word for it. Open the file you saved and try three things.

  • Select over the black. Drag your cursor across a redacted area. If text highlights, the redaction failed.
  • Select all and paste. Press Ctrl-A or Command-A in the PDF viewer, copy, and paste into a plain text editor. A file made here gives back nothing, because the whole text layer is gone.
  • Search it. Search for a word you blacked out. It should not be found. No word should be found, anywhere.

If searching the finished file turns up any text at all, something other than this tool made it. Do not send it.

This tool removes what you tell it to and nothing else. It does not know what in your document identifies you, and it does not decide what a public body may withhold; that is governed by RSA 91-A:5 and other statutes. How Granite State Report handles what you send, and the limits of what any newsroom can promise a source, are on the Send a Tip page. Granite State Report is a newsroom, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.
Built with. Rendering by PDF.js 3.11.174 and PDF assembly by jsPDF 2.5.1, both open source, both run in your browser. The same tool, with a longer explanation, is at Redact for subscribers.
Version log. v1.0, October 4, 2026: Published. An open copy of the subscriber Redact tool (v1.0.1) for people sending documents to Granite State Report, with no sign-up. One change from that tool: saved pages keep the original page size instead of coming out at twice the size. Checked before publishing against a test PDF: text extractable before, none after, and the original title and author fields gone. This page is never edited without a log entry.