Resecta: Redact PDFs

Resecta is a free, open-source iPhone app that redacts PDFs on-device and verifies the output. A black box drawn over text can leave the text underneath readable; Resecta is designed to remove the text in the regions you mark, not just cover it, then checks the redacted PDF before you share. There is no subscription and no account.

What to redact
• Search by text, regular expression or a list of terms, and save the searches you reuse.
• Scan looks for 17 kinds of personal information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers, and card and account numbers (many are US formats).
• Draw a rectangle by hand over anything else, or cover a page with Mark Whole Page.
Search and Scan results arrive unselected; nothing is redacted without your selection.

Redact
Marks show what will be removed. Tap Redact and Resecta rebuilds the PDF from page images, with the marked regions overwritten in the pixels. Secure Rasterization produces image-only output. Searchable Redaction keeps the text outside your redactions searchable, for PDFs that have a text layer.

Check before you share
Verification runs 7 checks on Secure Rasterization output and 12 on Searchable Redaction output, including text extraction, OCR, a search of the file's bytes, a metadata check, a re-run of the searches you applied, and a detection sweep. What they report is listed, and sharing a file with reported issues asks you to confirm. Verification is a check, not a substitute for your review.

Private by design
No accounts, no analytics, no data collection. The app makes no network requests of its own, and you can use it in airplane mode.

Good to know
• PDFs up to 50 MB and 500 pages. A password-protected PDF opens with its password; the redacted copy is not password-protected.
• JPEG, PNG and HEIC images open too, up to 20 at a time from Photos, or one at a time from Files or by dropping it onto an open document. Each becomes one page of a new PDF; the photo's metadata, such as location, is not carried into it, and the redacted copy is always a PDF.
• A file the app cannot read in full, or one that carries document JavaScript or a launch action, is refused at import, and the app says why.
• Resecta doesn't store your documents or edits; share or save the redacted copy to keep it.
• Name detection uses an on-device language model from iOS. Where it is unavailable, name results are reduced and the app says so.

Free and open source under Apache-2.0. Source: github.com/Merlin1A/resecta