Redacting a PDF (not the black-rectangle-on-top trick)
Why a black rectangle isn't redaction, what actually removes data, and the news-story-grade leaks this prevents.
Lawyers, FOIA respondents, and recruiters have all leaked sensitive data by drawing a black box on top of text in a PDF. The text was still there underneath. Real redaction destroys it.
Ready to try this yourself?
Open Edit PDF in a new tab and read the rest while you upload.
Every year or two there's a story where a government agency or law firm publishes a redacted document and a journalist copies the "redacted" text out by selecting underneath the black box. The black box was just a drawn shape on top of unchanged text.
The two operations
Cover-up. You drew an opaque rectangle on top of text. Visually hidden, structurally intact. Copy-paste still works. Search still works. This is not redaction.
True redaction. The bytes representing the text and underlying images are removed from the PDF file entirely and replaced with a black mark. Copy-paste returns blanks. The file size drops because the content is genuinely gone.
Evixpdf's Redact tool
Evixpdf's Redact Pages and the Edit tool's redaction surface both destroy the underlying bytes — they re-render the affected pages as images with the redacted regions filled in black. There's no recoverable layer underneath.
For partial-text redaction (one address in a paragraph), use the Edit tool's text-selection redaction. For "this whole page is internal-only," use Redact Pages.