Procurement asked me to send a reference contract to a potential vendor but it includes confidential pricing and clien…
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 permanently removes the text or image. It makes the content unrecoverable. Drawing a black rectangle only covers the text, but the text is still there underneath. Someone can easily copy and paste it to see what you tried to hide. Always use the Redact tool for security.
Redaction only removes visible content. A PDF can have hidden data like author names, creation dates, or past changes (metadata, layers, revision history). Sanitize removes this hidden data. This makes sure no one can find sensitive information that was not visible on the page, even after you redact it.
For many sensitive numbers like Social Security Numbers (SSNs) or account numbers, Acrobat Pro has an auto-redaction feature. This feature can find patterns of numbers and redact them automatically. After using it, have another person check a few random pages to make sure it worked correctly.
Yes, the Redact tool can also remove images. If your document is a scanned image, you can drag the redaction box over the parts of the image you want to hide. The tool will make those areas black and remove the content permanently. Remember to save the file after applying the redaction.