Redact a PDF without Adobe Acrobat Pro

Adobe Acrobat Pro is the tool most people reach for, and for typed text it is a good one. The difference shows up when what needs to go is a picture: a logo, a letterhead, a stamp, a name printed inside an image. Here is what each does, fairly.

Open the tool Free below twenty pages, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Before

After

A customer logo wall before and after: two of the ten brand marks are replaced with labelled black bars.

What Acrobat does well

Acrobat Pro can search the text layer for a word, a phrase or a pattern such as phone numbers, and mark every hit for redaction. It removes the marked content properly when you apply the redactions, it can sanitise hidden information such as metadata, and the desktop version runs on your own machine. If everything you need to remove is typed text, it does the job.

It can also repeat a mark you draw across a range of pages, which catches a logo that sits in exactly the same place on every page. And where a PDF reuses one embedded image on every page, redacting it once can remove it from all of them, because they are the same object; that is also why Acrobat users sometimes find a redaction spreading to pages they did not mean.

Where the difference is

Acrobat’s search only reads text. A logo is an image, so it is never found by searching; neither is a name printed inside a picture, a chart pasted as a screenshot, or anything on a scanned page without recognised text. A copy embedded separately, drawn as shapes, or flattened into a slide or a scan is not the same object, so it is left behind. A repeated mark covers a logo only where it is the same size in the same place, and misses the copy on the cover, the smaller one in a table, and the white one on a dark slide.

Blinded searches by sight. Pick a logo once and every copy is found at any size, position or colour. Type a name and it is found in the text, read out of pictures and scans, and matched by shape where the reading fails. On a real 28-page deck, one pick found all 26 copies of a company’s wordmark.

Side by side

Finding typed words and patterns: both. Finding every copy of a logo or picture: Blinded, by sight; Acrobat, only where the copy is in the same place on each page. Words inside pictures and scans: Blinded reads them; Acrobat needs a separate recognition pass first. Where the file is processed: Acrobat desktop, on your machine; Blinded, in your browser tab, with no install and no upload. Price: Acrobat Pro is a subscription; Blinded is free up to 20 pages, with a one-off license for longer documents.

They also work well together. If you already use Acrobat for text, Blinded is the step for the pictures.

Without an Acrobat Pro subscription

The free Adobe Acrobat Reader cannot redact; the redaction tools come with a paid Acrobat plan. A black box drawn in Reader, or in any viewer’s comment tools, is an annotation on top of the page, and the text under it can still be selected and copied.

Blinded needs no subscription and no install. Documents up to 20 pages are free, and a longer one needs a one-off license rather than a monthly plan.

What Blinded does not do

It is a redactor, not a PDF editor: it does not edit text, fill forms or sign. Its export rebuilds each page from pixels, which is what makes the redaction permanent; turn on searchable text and the redacted pages are read back, so the words that remain can still be found and copied.

How to do it, in four steps

Open the PDF in Blinded. Nothing is uploaded or installed.
Type the words you would have searched for in Acrobat.
Draw a box round each logo or picture to remove. Every copy is found.
Review, redact and export. The pages are rebuilt, so nothing is left underneath.

Who it is for

Anyone who already redacts in Acrobat and keeps finding logos, letterheads and names in pictures left behind, or who does not have an Acrobat Pro subscription.

Open the tool

Questions

Can Acrobat find all copies of an image?

Acrobat’s search reads text, so it does not find images by what they look like. It can repeat a mark across pages at the same position, and removes a reused embedded image wherever it is reused, but not copies that are separate images, shapes or scans.

Is Blinded as permanent as Acrobat’s redaction?

Yes. Each page is rebuilt from pixels on export, so the removed content is not in the file, and the file carries no metadata from the original.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It runs in a browser tab, and keeps working offline once the page has loaded.

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