Redact text & images
Redaction is new. It removes page content for real and verifies the result before it touches your document, but it has a few deliberate limits, listed below. Feedback helps it mature.
Something on the page must not leave with the file: an account number, a name, a signature, a photo. Covering it with a black box isn’t enough, because the original stays in the PDF where anyone can copy or extract it.
- Pick the Redact tool from the toolbar. It’s the black-bar icon next to the markup tools.
- Drag a rectangle over each thing to remove. Marks show as a red, dashed wash and change nothing yet. Press ⌘Z to take one back.
- When everything is marked, choose Apply Redactions… in the bar at the bottom of the page, then confirm.
Everything under each mark is removed from the document and replaced with a solid black box:
- Text under the mark is deleted from the file, so search, copy/paste, and extraction can’t find it.
- Images under the mark have their pixels blacked out. An image entirely inside a mark is deleted.
- Shapes under the mark (outlined text, drawn signatures, diagrams) are deleted. Any part outside the mark is kept as an image.
- Annotations under the mark (notes, highlights, links) are deleted.
Before Orifold changes anything, it re-reads the result and checks that no text remains inside any mark. If the check fails, nothing is changed. The removal reaches every copy Orifold keeps of your document, so save, reopen, export, and later edits can’t bring the content back. ⌘Z still undoes the redaction until you close the document.
Limits
Section titled “Limits”- Neighbouring words may become pixels. A PDF often stores a whole line as one piece of text. Orifold keeps the words next to your mark visible, but they become part of an image and stop being searchable or selectable. Running OCR makes them searchable again.
- Metadata, bookmarks, and accessibility tags aren’t changed. If a redacted word also appears in the document title or a bookmark, remove it there too, and turn on Sanitize for sharing when you export.
- Simple page-wide backgrounds may stay. A simple background or frame covering at least half the page can remain hidden under the black box, so the whole page doesn’t turn into an image. If a complex page-scale path or shading crosses a mark, Orifold refuses the redaction before changing anything because it cannot safely remove only the covered part.
- Form fields can’t be redacted in place. A field’s answer is stored outside the page, so Orifold refuses and asks you to clear or remove the field first.
- Placed signatures and page decorations must be moved or removed first. Their editable source lives separately from the PDF page and could otherwise be drawn again on save or export, so an overlapping mark is refused before mutation.
- Pages with text or object edits are refused until you undo those edits, so an edit can’t write the removed text back.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Edit existing PDF text: visual replacement, which is not redaction
- Sanitize for sharing: strip metadata, scripts, and embedded files on export