Obsidian

Redact PDFs from inside Obsidian using the PDF Redaction plugin — AI-detected PII, manual review, and redaction, without leaving your vault.

The PDF Redaction plugin for Obsidian hosts the PDF Redaction widget in a workspace tab, so you can redact any PDF in your vault — right-click a file, review AI-detected PII, and save the redacted copy back into your vault — without leaving Obsidian.

View on GitHub

The PDF Redaction plugin open in an Obsidian workspace tab, showing the widget's highlighted mode with detected phone, email, address, zip code, URL, organization, and face entities in the review panel

Early prototype

Not yet listed in the Obsidian community plugin store — install manually from a GitHub release. Desktop only.

Installation

Download main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json from the latest release.
Copy them into VaultFolder/.obsidian/plugins/pdf-redaction/ (create the folder if it doesn't exist).
In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins and enable PDF Redaction.

Setup

Open Settings → PDF Redaction and configure:

API key — a widget-enabled API key from your PDF Redaction account (Account → API keys).
Base URL — defaults to https://pdf-redaction.com.
Mode — full (manual PII review before redacting) or auto (one-click redact + download).
Locale — UI language for the embedded widget (en, de, pl, es).

Usage

Redact a vault PDF — right-click any .pdf file in the file explorer and choose Redact with PDF redaction, or run the Redact active PDF command while a PDF is open. This opens a "PDF redaction" tab pre-loaded with the file — no manual upload needed.
Open an empty tab — use the ribbon icon or the Open view command to open the widget without a file, falling back to its normal upload dialog.

When redaction finishes, the plugin writes the redacted PDF back into your vault next to the source file as redacted-<name>.pdf (auto-numbered if that name is already taken) — no browser download, and the file never leaves your device except for the PII-detection call to pdf-redaction.com.

How it works

The plugin embeds the same https://<base url>/<locale>/widget/embed/?key=... iframe used by widget.js and @stabrise/redaction-widget-react, extended with two vault-aware protocol messages:

LOAD_FILE (plugin → iframe) — sends the source PDF's bytes (read via app.vault.readBinary), so the embed skips its own upload dialog.
REDACTION_COMPLETE.data (iframe → plugin) — returns the redacted PDF's bytes instead of triggering a browser download, whenever the source file arrived via LOAD_FILE.

Source

Source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license.