We keep leaking financial details into marketing and partner materials. From the last five leaks, identify the weakest…
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 visible text permanently blacks out or removes text and images you can see on the page. Sanitizing a PDF goes further by removing hidden information that is not visible, such as metadata, comments, attachments, or hidden layers. Both are important for security, but redaction handles the on-page content, while sanitizing cleans up the document's background data.
Yes, for many common patterns like Social Security Numbers or account numbers, you can use Acrobat's pattern-based auto-redaction. This feature helps you find and redact all instances of a specific pattern in your document automatically. After using it, always have someone else check a few random examples to make sure it worked correctly.
It is important to work on a copy because redaction is permanent. Once you save a redacted document, the original sensitive information is gone forever. If you make a mistake or need the original unredacted version later, having a copy protects you from losing important data.
Yes, the Redact tool can hide information in scanned images. However, it only removes what is visible. If the scanned document also contains hidden text layers from an OCR process, you need to ensure those are also removed or sanitized. Always verify by trying to select or search the redacted area.