Basalt for Mac

Basalt for Mac is a native PDF editor for macOS that combines eighteen tools in one window: merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, forms, signatures and comparison. The core feature is redaction that removes sensitive text from the file itself rather than drawing a black box over it. Text is excised glyph by glyph, images under marks are destroyed and re-encoded, and metadata, XMP and attachments are stripped.

Every redaction is verified before the file is written. The app re-opens what it wrote with an independent parser to prove strings are absent, pixels changed and history gone. If any check fails, no file is written. You get a certificate signed with ED25519 that opposing counsel can verify with shasum and openssl, with no Basalt required.

Documents never leave your Mac. The PDF parsing engine runs in a separate process with no network entitlement, enforced at the code-signature level by macOS. The interface itself cannot parse PDFs at all. Automation scripts can propose marks but cannot apply them without you or phone home.