How to Black Out Text in Acrobat

There may be times when your business needs to share sensitive documents with third parties without sharing confidential information on the documents. In those cases, you may find yourself needing to redact, or black out, the sensitive text in question. If done incorrectly, a poor PDF redaction job can leave the sensitive information vulnerable. Here's how to safely black out text in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

How to Redact in Adobe Acrobat Pro

1. Open the PDF that contains the text you want to black out.
2. ToolsRedact
3. Mark for RedactionOK
4. Select the text you want to black out by double-clicking it directly or clicking and dragging to highlight it.
5. ApplyOK

After you finish, you are prompted to "also find and remove hidden information in your document." This refers to metadata about the creation of the document. If you choose yes, any private information such as revision history or authorship information is purged from the document's data.

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Black Out Every Instance of a Specific Word

If you want to redact all iterations of specific words, names or phrases, you can do so easily using Acrobat's Find Text tool. Here's how:

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1. RedactTools
2. Mark for RedactionRedactionFind Text
3. Single Word Or PhraseMultiple Words Or PhrasePatterns
4. Single Word Or Phrase
5. Multiple Words Or PhraseSelect WordsNew Word Or PhraseAdd.
6. Patterns.
7. Search & Remove Text
8. + sign
9. Check All
10. Mark Checked Results For RedactionApply.
11. FileSave.

Repeat a Redaction Across Your Document

If you want to repeat a redaction mark across an entire document, like a repeating watermark, footer or header, you can do so by using Acrobat's Repeat Mark Across Page. This tool works specifically if a mark appears in the same location on multiple pages of your PDF. To use it, right-click the specific redacted mark and select the Repeat Mark Across Page option.

Confirming Your Adobe Acrobat Redaction Worked

After you finish the PDF redaction, confirm the blacked out text was properly redacted. To do so, open the document, copy the block of text you blacked out and paste it in a new document. Your redactions should remain in place. You can also try searching for the text you blacked out using a word document editor to confirm it doesn't show up.

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You can further confirm the redaction by opening the redacted PDF in Adobe Acrobat or another third-party PDF editor to attempt to unredact it. If the redaction was completed successfully, there is no way to reverse or locate the text you have blacked out because it no longer exists.

Alternative Redaction Method

If you don't have Adobe Acrobat Pro to black out text, try this method. Print out the PDF document and find the section you want to black out. Use a physical black marker to manually black out the text.

After that, scan the PDF onto your computer and open it. You should no longer be able to edit or search the text that is blacked out physically.

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How to Redact in Acrobat Without Blacking Out Text

If you want to redact text in Acrobat but change the look of the redactions, you can do so by going to Properties from the Redaction secondary menu bar when you select the Redact tool. Once in Properties, choose the options you want to change in the Appearance tab, such as setting a new color that fills in the redacted area or setting overlay text to cover redacted information.

References

• Adobe: Removing Sensitive Content From PDFs
• Extract: Three Ways to Redact a Document

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Resources

Tips

• Adobe Acrobat Pro also enables you to use overlay text as a redaction marker and to customize the appearance of the fill-type marker to a color other than black. Open the "Tools" menu, choose its "Protection" submenu and select "Redaction Properties" to access these settings.
• If your document contains instances of a text item in the same place on multiple pages, redact the first instance, right-click on it and choose "Repeat Mark Across Pages."
• Redaction marks remain selectable and deletable until you save your file.

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Warnings

• Apply redaction to a copy of your document to preserve your original file. Add "redacted" to the name of the duplicate file so you can differentiate it from the unredacted PDF.