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PDF Unmasker & Layer Inspector

Inspect the drawing layers of a PDF, strip solid cover-up rectangles placed over text, extract the raw hidden text underneath, and enhance scanned or marker-censored pages. Everything runs locally in your browser.

100% Client-Side Inspection: Your document is analysed and re-rendered entirely inside your browser and is never uploaded to any server. Use it only on documents you own or are authorised to inspect.

Choose a PDF

How to Use PDF Unmasker & Layer Inspector

  1. Step 1

    Add your input

    Paste text, enter values or choose a file from your device. PDF Unmasker & Layer Inspector loads it instantly — nothing is uploaded.

  2. Step 2

    Adjust the options

    Fine-tune the settings and watch the result update live in your browser as you make changes.

  3. Step 3

    Copy or download

    Grab the result with one click. Downloads are generated locally and saved straight to your device.

Load a PDF and the tool walks every page's drawing layer looking for solid dark rectangles that were painted on top of text — the most common way people 'black out' a document without real redaction. Each suspected cover-up is outlined on the page preview: click a box once to delete that shape and reveal what sits underneath, click again to restore it, or flip the Auto-Remove Covering Shapes toggle to strip every detected rectangle at once. The Raw Text Extractor tab bypasses the visuals entirely and pulls the actual string data out of the PDF text layer into a copyable text box, which works even when the shapes are baked into the layout.

For scanned pages or semi-transparent marker censorship, open the Exposure Enhancer tab and push the brightness, contrast and exposure sliders until the writing under the marker shows through; the threshold slider can then snap the result to clean black-and-white. When the page reads clearly, Export Clean PDF re-renders every page without the removed shapes and with your enhancement settings applied, and downloads the result as a new PDF. Nothing is uploaded at any point — all inspection, re-rendering and export happens in your browser's memory.

Key Benefits & Privacy Features

PDF Unmasker & Layer Inspector is built on a simple principle: the work should happen where your data already is. Most online utilities follow an upload-process-download model, which means your document, photo or recording is copied onto infrastructure you cannot inspect, written to temporary storage, read by a worker process and kept until some retention job removes it. Every one of those steps is a place your information exists in readable form. GetToolix removes the model entirely. The processing code is delivered to your browser once, and from that moment onwards the tool reads your file from your own disk into memory, transforms it with your own processor, and writes the result back out as a download.

That architectural choice eliminates whole categories of risk rather than merely reducing them. There is no breach exposure, because a server that never receives your file cannot leak it. There is no retention drift between a stated deletion policy and what backup systems actually keep. There is no secondary use — no training datasets, no analytics enrichment, no profile built from your content. And there is no cross-border transfer to reason about, which matters when the file is an HR record, a medical letter, an identity scan, a client contract or an unreleased product design.

Zero uploads by design

Your file is opened from your disk straight into browser memory. It is never placed in a network request, so there is no server copy, no temporary bucket and no retention policy to trust.

Instant, upload-free speed

Because nothing has to travel to a data centre and back, results appear as fast as your own processor can produce them — usually in under a second, even for large files.

No limits, no account, no watermark

There is no sign-up, no daily quota, no file-size cap and no watermark on anything you export. Use the tool as often as you need, free of charge.

Keeps working offline

Once the page has loaded, the tool continues to run without an internet connection, because every part of the pipeline lives inside your browser tab.

Nothing to leak or profile

No content is stored, logged or analysed. Since your data never reaches a server, it cannot be exposed in a breach, shared with third parties or used to train a model.

Downloads generated locally

Every export is written by your own browser to your download folder using an in-memory object URL, so the finished file is created on your device rather than fetched from elsewhere.

You do not have to take this on trust. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab and use the tool normally: if a file were being uploaded you would see a request whose payload matches its size. You will see nothing after the page itself loads. A second test is even simpler — load the page, disconnect from the internet, and keep working. Local processing carries on because none of it depends on a server.

Frequently Asked Questions