Check a redaction
Find out whether the words you blacked out can still be pulled out of the file.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
- 1
Add your file
Add the document you already redacted. Do this before you send it, not after — this is the check that tells you whether the redaction actually worked.
- 2
Set it up the way you want
Type the words that were supposed to be removed: a name, a number, an address. The tool searches for them everywhere they could still be hiding.
- 3
Download the result
Read the report. If it found nothing, the removal held. If it found something, you know exactly where — before the recipient does.
Questions about Check a redaction
- Where does it look?
- Not just the page text. It searches the document metadata, the XMP block, annotations, form field values, bookmark titles and attachment names. Those are the places redaction leaks from, precisely because nobody thinks to look at them.
- Why would a redaction fail at all?
- Most often because a black box was drawn in an ordinary editor instead of the content being removed. Sometimes because the name was also sitting in the document properties, or in a bookmark, or in the name of an attached file.
- Does capitalisation matter?
- No. The search folds case and accents, including the Turkish dotted and dotless i, which trips up naive matching: an uppercase I lowercases to a dotted i in most software, so "AHMET YILMAZ" would silently fail to match "Yılmaz".