No more font or formatting problems after edits
Court filings, contracts and reports have been published with their secrets intact because someone drew black boxes over the text. The boxes hid the words from the eye; the words stayed in the file. Anyone could select them, copy them, or simply delete the boxes.
A PDF page is built in layers. A rectangle drawn on top — a highlight in black, a shape, a comment — is one more layer. The text under it is untouched: search finds it, copy and paste takes it, and screen readers read it aloud.
Real redaction takes the letters and the picture pixels out of the page itself and only then puts a black box where they were, so that the reader knows something was removed. After it, there is nothing under the box to recover.
Open the PDF and press Redact on the left.
Drag over each piece that must go. The frame snaps to the letters it mostly covers, so you see exactly what will be removed. Mark as many areas as you need, on any page.
Press Black out for good. The text and the picture pixels under the frames are removed from the page, and black boxes take their place. Seamtype then checks that nothing outside the frames changed; if something would have, the page is left as it was and you are told why.
Download the redacted file.
Removed from the file, not just covered — in your browser.
Search the downloaded file for a redacted word in any PDF reader: it should not be found.
Select and copy the area of a black box: nothing should come out.
Look for every occurrence before redacting: use Find to see where a name or a number appears, so that none is missed.
Check the rest of the file: comments, form fields and attachments are not part of the page text; remove what must not stay.