Basalt

Basalt puts 18 PDF tools in one native Mac window: merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, forms, signatures and comparison. Redaction is the one the engine was built for, and it destroys rather than covers, with a verifier that proves the job before any file is written. No cloud, no account. Your documents never leave your Mac.

Redaction

Most PDF redaction draws a black box over the text. Basalt removes the words from the file itself. Text is excised glyph by glyph and what survives is re-emitted in place, reading order intact. Images under a mark are destroyed and re-encoded. Metadata, XMP, attachments, hidden layers and stale thumbnails are stripped.

The Verifier

Before a redacted file reaches you, Basalt re-opens what it wrote with an independent parser and proves the job: strings absent, pixels changed, history gone. If any check fails, no file is written at all. Then it issues a certificate you can file, verifiable with shasum and openssl. The output is byte-reproducible, so a third party can re-run your marks and confirm what was filed.

Privacy

The engine that opens your documents is a separate process holding no network entitlement, enforced by macOS at the code-signature level. There is no server, no account and no telemetry.

The Toolkit

Redact, merge, split, organise pages, compress, make searchable (OCR), passwords, Bates numbers, forms, sign, watermark, images to PDF, procedures, inspect, clean up, compare, scripts and a privilege log in CSV and XLSX. None of it ever modifies your original file.

Getting Started

Download Basalt (19 MB, macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple silicon and Intel in one universal build). The whole app works free for 24 hours, every tool, no account and no card.

Pricing and Plans

$29 once for a lifetime license on up to three Macs. No subscription.