Vellum’s redaction genuinely removes the hidden content from the file produced, unlike a black rectangle drawn on top, whose text remains copyable. After processing, the redacted passage can no longer be extracted, which you can verify with a simple copy and paste. Everything happens on your device.
No. Unlike a black rectangle drawn on top of text — whose content remains copyable — Vellum genuinely removes the redacted passage from the file it produces. You can verify yourself that copying the masked area no longer returns anything.
Open the document, draw a rectangle over each area to hide directly on the page preview, then confirm: the covered content is deleted before the final PDF is generated.
No. Proposed zones — IBAN, Swiss AVS number, e-mail address, phone, dates, amounts, free text or a regular expression — are suggestions to review on the preview: nothing is redacted until you click “Redact and download”. You can remove a single proposed zone or all of them at once, and add your own by hand. A scanned document with no text layer must go through the OCR tool first.
No, everything happens on your own device in the browser; the document is never uploaded. The tool is free and does not work on a file that is already password-protected — you need to unlock it first.
Because Vellum’s redaction does not lay a rectangle on top: each page is rendered as an image, the areas are painted black on that image, and the PDF is rebuilt from those images. The original text therefore no longer exists in the file produced. The trade-off is deliberate: all the text on the page becomes an image. If you need a searchable document, run the result through text recognition.
Yes, and it is in fact the simplest case, since the method already works on the page image. Automatic pattern detection, however, needs a text layer: on a raw scan it finds nothing. Run the document through text recognition first, or draw the areas by hand.
Open the file produced and search for the removed term with your reader’s search function. If it returns nothing, the text is no longer in the file. That is exactly the test a black rectangle fails: the word is still findable underneath.
Vellum — free PDF tools whose processing stays on your device.