Drawing a black rectangle over a name does not remove the name. In most PDF tools the text is still there underneath, still selectable, still in the file — which is how redaction failures keep ending up in the news. This destroys what it covers.
Cover text in a PDF and destroy what is underneath by flattening the page to raster, so it cannot be selected, copied or recovered. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Open the editorFree, no account, and the file stays on your machine.
A PDF keeps its text as text and its drawings as drawings, in separate operations in the same content stream. Adding a filled rectangle on top changes what the page looks like and nothing about what it contains. Select across the area, copy, and paste: the words come back. Any text extractor gets them instantly, and so does anyone who opens the file in an editor.
This is not a hypothetical failure mode. Court filings, government releases and corporate disclosures have all been unredacted this way by readers who did nothing more sophisticated than select the text and copy it.
Mark the areas with the Redact tool in Edit, then use Apply redactions. Every page carrying a redaction is rendered to an image at a DPI you choose — 200 by default — and that image replaces the page. The text objects, and the vector artwork, and anything else that was underneath the mark, are not covered up. They no longer exist in the output file.
Only the pages you marked are flattened; the rest of the document is copied through untouched, so a two-page redaction in a hundred-page report does not rasterise the other ninety-eight.
Verify it yourself afterwards: open the saved file, go to Decompose, and extract the text. If a redacted word appears in the output, the redaction did not apply — and it will not.
A rasterised page is an image. Its text is no longer selectable or searchable and the file is usually larger, which is the direct price of the content being genuinely gone. Raise the DPI for a crisper page and a bigger file, or lower it for the reverse.
Keep your original. The redacted copy is the one to send; the working document here is never written back over the file you opened.
Not from the flattened pages. Those pages are images of what remained after the marks were applied; the covered content is not present in the output in any form, so there is nothing to recover.
No. Only pages that carry at least one redaction are flattened. Everything else is copied through as it was.
No — a flattened page has no text layer. That is the point. If you need the rest of the document searchable, it stays searchable; only the redacted pages lose it.
No, which matters more here than anywhere else in the app. A document you are redacting is by definition one with something sensitive in it, and it never leaves your machine.
The saved file is written fresh, so the original document's metadata is not carried over. Check the result in Decompose under Fonts and metadata if that matters for what you are sending.