You need to share a contract but must hide client names and financial figures. You're filing court documents that require social security numbers to be removed. You're publishing government records that contain personal information protected by privacy laws. Simply covering text with black boxes or deleting it in a Word document doesn't work—anyone can remove your black rectangles or recover "deleted" text from PDF metadata. PDF redaction tools solve this by permanently removing sensitive content so it cannot be recovered, ensuring your documents are truly safe to share. This guide explains everything you need to know about redacting PDF documents in clear, practical terms. You'll learn why most redaction fails (a shocking 65% of "redacted" PDFs still leak data), the critical difference between visual hiding and true removal, how attackers recover supposedly hidden information, and the proper methods that actually protect sensitive data. What is PDF ...