A supervisor asked me to send a personnel file by 3pm but it contains Social Security numbers and medical notes. I can…
Open the PDF you want to redact in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Go to Tools and select Redact.
Click Find and Remove Text.
Enter the word, phrase, or pattern you want to search for in the search box.
Choose the location to search (e.g., current document or all PDFs in a folder), then click Search.
Review the search results and check all instances you want to redact, or use Select All to mark every occurrence.
Click Mark for Redaction to mark the selected instances.
Click Apply Redactions and confirm when prompted to permanently remove the marked content.
CautionRedactions are permanent and cannot be undone after saving.
Best practiceYou can customize the appearance of redaction marks before applying them by adjusting settings in the Redact tool.
Best practiceAlways double-check your search term and results to ensure all sensitive information is covered, especially with patterns like SSNs.
Save the redacted PDF with a new file name.
You can use the Find Text and Redact feature to quickly locate and mark all instances of sensitive words or patterns for redaction throughout your document.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
Redacting only removes visible text and images. Your PDF might still contain hidden data like metadata, comments, or revision history. Sanitizing removes all this hidden information, ensuring no sensitive details remain in the document when you share it. This makes your document truly clean.
For many SSNs or account numbers, use Acrobat Pro's pattern-based auto-redaction feature. This tool can find and mark specific patterns of numbers automatically. After auto-redaction, have another person (peer-QC) review a random sample of the redacted areas. This helps catch any mistakes and ensures all sensitive data is properly removed, especially in bulk documents.
Yes, the Redact tool can also redact images. If your scanned document's text is part of an image, you can still drag the redaction box over it. The tool will permanently black out that area of the image. However, for best results, it's always better to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) first to make the text selectable if possible.
Redaction is a permanent action. Once you save a redacted document, you cannot undo the changes. Working on a copy protects your original document, allowing you to go back to the unredacted version if you make a mistake or need the original later.