Free un-redaction check

Your PDF looks redacted. Is it really?

Black boxes and highlights often leave the original text sitting right underneath — recoverable with copy-paste or pdftotext. Drop a file below and we'll check the text layer and the usual leak surfaces. We never store your file or show the recovered text.

(Bot-check not configured — dev mode)

How it works

Three steps, nothing stored.

1
Upload a redacted PDF

Drag in any PDF you're about to share. It's analyzed in memory and discarded — no account, no storage, no copy kept.

2
We look where leaks hide

Live text under dark covers and un-applied redactions, plus embedded files, comments, form values, document scripts, and earlier saved revisions.

3
Get a plain verdict

Recoverable or not — with the exact limits of the check spelled out. The recovered text itself is never returned to anyone.

The honest limits

What it catches — and what it can't.

It catches
  • Text left live under black or dark opaque boxes
  • Redaction annotations that were never applied
  • Black boxes pasted in as images
  • Metadata, embedded files, comments, form values & earlier revisions
It can't catch
  • Text hidden under light-coloured or see-through covers
  • Text baked into a page image (that needs OCR)
  • Whether a redaction was the right call in the first place

Treat this as a fast safety check, not a sign-off. A result of “no recoverable text detected” means we didn't find a leak we look for — not that the document is guaranteed clean.

Found something? Redact it properly.

Lacuna removes text from the PDF's text layer — not just a box over the top — and logs every decision in a hash-chained, tamper-evident audit log.