Redaction that removes the words, not just covers them.
A black rectangle over a paragraph is not redaction. The glyphs stay in the content stream and any tool — including ours — can still read them. Firms have leaked privileged material exactly that way.
What actually happens when you redact
You mark the areas to remove, then apply. CompendiumPDF renders each affected page at 200 dpi, paints the redaction boxes onto that bitmap, and replaces the original page with the image. The text, fonts and vectors that were on that page are gone from the file entirely.
The trade-off, stated plainly. Redacted pages become images, so they are no longer searchable text. The application warns you before it does this, and offers OCR afterwards to rebuild a text layer from what is still visible.
Why the usual approach fails
Drawing a filled rectangle over a paragraph adds a drawing instruction to the page. It does not remove the characters underneath. Anyone can select the text through the box, copy it, or extract it with a script. Every few years a firm publishes a document redacted this way and the contents are read within hours.
Common questions
How is this different from drawing a black box?
A black box leaves the original text in the file, where it can still be extracted. CompendiumPDF converts the affected pages to images so the underlying text is destroyed rather than hidden.
What is the trade-off?
Redacted pages become images, so they stop being searchable text. The application tells you this before it applies the change, and you can run OCR afterwards to restore a text layer covering only what remains visible.
Is the redaction verifiable?
Yes. After redacting, the removed words are absent from the raw bytes of the saved file, not merely covered by a drawing instruction.
Get started
Buy a license and set up your account in one pass, then download the installer. One installer covers CompendiumPDF, CompendiumWP and Compendium LECX, and installs without administrator rights.