An events vendor needs our attendee contact list tonight, but it contains home addresses and personal phone numbers. I…
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.
Redaction only removes visible content. Sanitizing removes hidden data like metadata, comments, and revision history. If you don't sanitize, someone might still find sensitive information hidden in the file, even after you redact the visible parts.
| Feature | Redaction Tool | Black Rectangle |
|---|---|---|
| Effect | Permanently removes text/images. | Covers text, but it's still there underneath. |
| Recoverability | Content is gone forever once saved. | Text can be copied and pasted to reveal it. |
| Security | Secure for sensitive data. | Not secure; easy to bypass. |
Yes, redacting a scanned document will remove the visible image of the text. However, if the scanned document was made searchable using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the underlying searchable text might still exist. Always sanitize the PDF after redacting a scanned document and verify by trying to select or search for the redacted text.
Redaction codes are labels you can add to redacted areas, like 'Privacy' or 'Confidential'. They explain why something was hidden. You can create your own code sets for your team. To use them, after marking content for redaction, right-click the red box, choose 'Properties', and select a code from your list. This helps keep redaction consistent and clear.