Adobe Acrobat: Acrobat is one of the most popular PDF editing platforms, and can be obtained at Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (https://acrobat.adobe.com). Follow these steps to redact documents using Acrobat:
- Open your document in Acrobat.
- Choose Tools > Redact. The Redact toolset is displayed in the secondary toolbar.
- In the secondary toolbar, choose Mark for Redaction > Text & Images.
- (Optional) To set the appearance of redaction marks, click Properties in the secondary toolbar.
- Mark items you want to remove by doing any of the following:
- Double-click to select a word or image.
- Drag to select a line, block of text, object, or area.
- Press Ctrl as you drag to select areas of a page in a scanned document.
- (Optional) To repeat a redaction mark, right-click it and choose Repeat Mark Across Pages. This feature is convenient if a particular header, footer, or watermark appears in the same location on many pages.
- When you have finished marking the items you want to redact, click Apply in the secondary toolbar to remove the items, then click OK. The items aren’t permanently removed from the document until you save it.
- Choose File > Save, and specify a filename and location. The suffix “_Redacted” is appended to the filename. If you don’t want to overwrite the original file, save the file with a different name, at a different location, or both.
A good alternative to Acrobat is PDF Buddy (www.pdfbuddy.com), which allows you to edit a small number of PDFs for free, or unlimited PDFs for $7.99 per month.
In PDF Buddy, use the “whiteout” tool to draw a rectangle around the text to be redacted. You may add as many rectangles as you want. This will conceal the text you wish to redact. When you save and download your file, the whiteout will become permanent.