Developer's browser redaction tool shows why black boxes can leave text recoverable

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A developer found that drawing a black rectangle over text in a PDF does not remove the underlying text, which can still be extracted with pdf.js. Many redaction tools either rewrite the content stream or render pages as images, but they often report success without showing whether the marked regions were actually cleared. The developer built a check that counts extractable characters inside each marked box and reports zero results in a way that distinguishes between no text present, scanned pages, and genuinely removed text. The tool runs this verification as a user-triggered step and re-checks its own exported output, so users can see how many extractable characters remain.

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