Guide
Drawing a black rectangle over a name hides it on screen, and nowhere else. The text stays in the file, one copy and paste away.
Updated
In Word, a word processor or a PDF editor, a rectangle, a black highlight or a black font colour changes how a word looks. The word itself is still in the document, with its letters and its position. A screen shows the top layer; a program reading the file reads every layer.
Exporting the document to PDF does not change that. The PDF holds the text objects and, above them, a black shape. The page looks redacted, and the text is still there.
No special skill is needed. Each of these takes a few seconds:
Court filings, official reports and company documents have been published with black boxes that readers removed with a copy and paste. The cause is rarely carelessness: the page looks right, and nothing on screen warns that the text is still there.
Even with the visible text removed, a document may still hold:
Real redaction removes the text and everything that carries it. The method that leaves the least behind rebuilds each page as an image with the masked areas painted in, removes the metadata and hidden content, and checks the copy before it leaves.
This is what Obscelis does on export. The copy is written next to the original and reread independently: text, OCR, annotations, forms, attachments and metadata. If a masked value can still be found, the export is refused rather than published.
Usually not. Printing to PDF keeps the text as text and the box as a shape above it. Only a printer that rasterises the page, or a scan of a paper print, turns the page into an image, and the scan then loses quality and keeps no record of what was masked.
No. A highlight is a formatting of the text: removing it, or copying the text, shows the words. The same goes for a black font colour on a black background.
Try to select and copy the text under the black areas, search for a value that should be masked, and look at the document properties. If any of these shows the text, the document was not redacted.
Redacting a PDF means removing information from the file, not hiding it on screen. Here is the method, the traps, and how to check the result.
A person who asks for their data is entitled to a copy of it. The other people named in the same documents are entitled to stay out of it.
Summarising a contract, rewording a report, analysing a table: AI assistants are useful. What you paste into them leaves your computer.
Download it for macOS, Windows or Linux: the trial needs no account and no card. A question, or a demonstration for your team? Write to us.
latelierdudev.contact@gmail.com
Opens your e-mail app. We only use your address to reply.
