What's up this is easy osx and today i'm going to show you how to redact text in a pdf document using preview to do this you're going to need at least mac os 11 big sur or newer that's when they introduce this feature now there's the understandable but mistaken idea that redacting text means that you just have to cover it up with a colored box and your text is done away with that may work in physical documents but not digital documents let me demonstrate that here i've got this old nsa document from their public archive and i'll have the link to it in the description and i'll be covering over winston churchill's name here as you can see when you do that in big sur you'll get a warning box that basically says the text isn't actually removed from the document case in point if i highlight this phrase around and including the text i covered over and put it into this text editor you can see that the phrase contains the text i covered over and you can find news articles where this has bitten people in the butt even if you're not involved in a political scandal there may be times where you need to redact text before sending it over the web as an additional layer of privacy or security in preview starting in big sur you can now use the redact feature either by going to tools in the menu.
Bar and hitting redact or by hitting the markup button in the toolbar and then hitting the redact button typically they're from the left and looks like a square with a solid outlined in interior you'll get a warning that once you close the document the text underneath will be deleted and won't be recoverable so make sure you double check yourself before you think you're done now you'll notice the button is lit up in this case to a teal color and when i highlight the text it's instead drawing black squares with white x's through them while i'm still in editing mode i can hover over the text to see what the text actually says and if i make a mistake i can hit the undo button either in the edit menu of the menu bar or by hitting command z on the keyboard if you want to get out of redaction mode hit another button in the markup toolbar such as the text highlight button in this state the text is still highlightable remember it's only when you close or duplicate the document that the text will actually be removed so i'm going to duplicate this as a new file to show you and name this the redacted copy now when i highlight that same phrase and copy it into the text editor you can see that winston churchill's name is not present in the copy text so if you've got any text you need removed ...
