Black boxes in PDFs often hide text that can still be extracted

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A drawn black rectangle over text in a PDF is only a visual shape, and the underlying words usually remain in the file where they can be copied or extracted. The article explains a quick check using the pdftotext command, a browser search, or a short pdfjs-dist script to see whether supposedly redacted text is still present. It notes that sensitive words can also survive in comments, form fields, bookmarks, attachments, metadata, and OCR text layers on scanned pages. A true redaction tool removes the content itself from the page and related parts of the file before drawing the black box. The author recommends running this check before sending any redacted PDF.

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