Redact — remove text for good

Redaction removes confidential text from a document for good: Social Security numbers, a client's name, a privileged paragraph, a bank account. When you're done, the words aren't hidden — they're gone.

Why this matters

A common and costly mistake is drawing a black box over text and assuming it's gone. It isn't — the box is just a graphic sitting on top, and the words are still underneath, where anyone can copy them out or find them in a search. That's how confidential information ends up in a public filing. Real redaction removes the text itself.

RaioPDF's Redact tool removes it, then double-checks its own work.

How to do it

1. Open the PDF.
2. In the Legal tools, choose Redact.
3. Drag a box over each thing you want removed. Add as many boxes as you need.
4. Click Apply Redactions. RaioPDF tells you how many areas will be permanently removed — confirm, and it removes them and checks its work.
5. Save. RaioPDF leaves your original file untouched and asks for a new file name, suggesting _redacted.pdf — so you keep both the original and the redacted copy.

Applying redactions changes the document open in RaioPDF; the file on your disk isn't touched until you save, and even then RaioPDF steers you to a new file rather than over the original.

What "verified" means

After it removes the text, RaioPDF re-reads the whole document to make sure the words can't be pulled back out. It also checks the redacted pages' images, any hidden notes attached to those pages, and the file's hidden info (the details a PDF quietly carries about how it was made). If anything you redacted still shows up, RaioPDF tells you instead of pretending it worked.

When you see Verified, the content is actually gone.

What to know

• Your original is protected for you. Applying redactions changes only the document open in RaioPDF — the file on your disk is left untouched. When you save, RaioPDF asks for a new file name (suggesting _redacted.pdf), so you end up with both the original and the redacted copy without having to remember to.
• The removed text is gone for good. Once you save the redacted version, the words are deleted from that file, not hidden. There's no recovering them from it later — which is exactly what you want in a document you're producing.
• If it can't be verified, nothing changes. If RaioPDF can't confirm the text is truly gone, it leaves your document exactly as it was and tells you what failed — it won't hand you a file it isn't sure about.
• Catch what you missed first. Run the 2.425 Scanner before you file to flag Social Security and account numbers you might have overlooked.