How to redact a PDF securely
- Choose Attach PDF and select Cover colour before drawing a rectangle over sensitive content.
- Use the page arrows to review every page. Undo Last Area or Clear This Page lets you correct your selections.
- Choose Export Secure Redaction, download the copy and inspect every covered region before sharing it.
Why ordinary covering is unsafe
Adding a rectangle, highlight or whiteout layer may only hide the content visually. The underlying text can sometimes still be selected, copied or recovered. This export rasterizes every page and burns the selected cover colours into the result.
Quality and accessibility trade-off
Every exported page is flattened into an image, even if it has no redaction rectangles. Selectable text, links and interactive form fields are not retained in the result.
Review the visible result, not just the rectangles
Cover the whole sensitive area, including small characters close to the edge of a word or account number. If the same detail appears in a header, footer, table or another page, draw a separate cover for each occurrence. Choosing white instead of black changes the cover's appearance; it does not change how the export removes the underlying selectable layer.
This is a manual page-covering workflow, not an automatic search-and-redact engine or a compliance certification service. FlowPDF rebuilds every output page as an image, including pages with no rectangles. That means searchable text, interactive fields and working links are lost throughout the result. Keep an untouched original securely and inspect the download at a readable zoom. Redaction cannot help if you accidentally share the original alongside the redacted copy.