If you don't want to remember the correct incantation for convert you can use pdf-redact-tools, a shell script automating the process of exploding a PDF into PNG images and merging them back together after redaction (using a tool of your choice e.g. gimp). It's conventiently apt-get installable.

UPDATE November 2023: I noticed that this approach works well when annotating the PDF with e.g. Foxit PDF Reader but not with Evince. In the latter case, the annotations won't show up in the rasterized version, i.e. everything will be visible again. This is quite weird because whether I annotate the PDF with black rectangles/text highlights using Foxit or Evince, the resulting annotating PDF superficially looks the same in the other PDF reader (Evince or Foxit) respectively. But ImageMagick seems to see different things.

Do NOT stop here! You still need to rasterize the document to merge your redactions with the content underneath, thereby stripping the original text and images.

Is there a specific tool that permits redaction in this way? (It doesn't even need to be "real" redaction -- I'm not sending a softcopy so "fake" redaction will work because the hardcopy can't be hacked to reveal the underlying text.)

Note 2: convert does not preserve the contents of forms you might have filled out. In order for it to not get lost you might want to print the document "to a file" in something like evince first (or in whatever application you filled out the form) and then rasterize it.

I was very surprised that all the other answers involve jumping through various kinds of hoops (rasterisation, splitting/joining files, using special tools, ugh).

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Going the vector to bitmap route is the safest way, preferably the 1bit bitmap route, to avoid any potential issues with alpha channels or color differences that could leave the text readable.

If possible you should always redact the original document and just flat out remove the info, not the paint on the PDF, as even the kerning and spacing of text around the redacted text can give it away.

Xournalpp is a popular variant of Xournal which has what you need. It is not available via the package manager (on Ubuntu 20.10), but a Github release can be built using CMake.

In Xournalpp you should then select the rectangle icon and, next to the pen colours, the paint bucket icon. You can then create filled rectangles - but they will be transparent. To make them fully opaque, select Tools > Pen Options > Fill Transparency and change the pop-up to 100%. (This is explained on the Github issue here.)

But, now you need edit all this files. You can do it with gimp original-filename-*.pdf. I suggest configure shortcut in GIMP (Main window->Edit-> Shortcut) to replace file (I use CTRL+R), blur filter (eg. CTRL+D), close file (eg. CTRL+W) and exit GIMP (eg.CTRL+Q). Remember to don't load in GIMP to many files at once, but GIMP as you about load after open, so you can use gimp original-filename-*.pdf on thousand files safe.

Note that rasterization is super important! Rasterization is what converts the entire PDF into an image, which 1) removes searchable text from the PDF, thereby actually redacting your text if you used the Foxit Reader option above, and 2) blends your redaction boxes in with the images and text behind them, thereby actual redacting the image content left over behind your boxes from both redaction options above.

Regarding "quality loss" when opening the page in Gimp: you can directly open a PDF file in Gimp. It will be rasterized in the process. The amount of quality loss in the process is a matter of resolution you choose when importing - 300 dpi should give you a very decent quality (the default is 100).

Redacting PDFs is a fairly common need for me, and after much trial and pain over the years, this is the process I've finally come to:

For me the best way is split PDF in 1-page PDF file, next to edit with GIMP, next to combine it. I don't use imagemagick on all files (I do not use at all), so I don't loss text-layer on all pages, but only on redacted. Do not load the whole PDF file at once, because it causes memory exhaustion.

Option 2 (what I do for redacting with many boxes in repeated patterns, such as on a W-2 US tax form): use LibreOffice Writer:

There are multiple editors for editing PDF documents directly, such as pdfedit, or converter it to other vector formats that might be better supported, such as pstoedit. However I wouldn't recommend the use of any of them as the risk of doing something stupid, like just painting over the text with black while leaving the vectors in place is to easy, thus making the redaction trivial to undo.

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As a lot of solutions here recommend redacting / blacking out through annotations (which leave the original content in the pdf), I recommend rasterizing the pdf afterwards to truly remove the original content. (Don't be this guy.)

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There is a simple tool called redact-magic-paste that can be used to easily and directly convert the (to be redacted) text into a sequence of solid block "█" characters. This means that the redacted text is gone - so the resulting file is safe to share digitally as well as print - while also avoiding the downsides of rasterisation (huge unsearchable files, splitting/joining, etc).

Here's one way to do that which, at the same time, keeps the quality up and the file size low (at least in my case of a bunch of black/white pages):

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The PDF you have rasterized and printed-to-PDF from Okular is now your final, redacted PDF you can share with others. But, before we do that, let's verify that is truly has been sanitized.

So, now you've seen what rasterization does, and that just drawing black boxes is not enough. You need to convert the PDF to a new image somehow to strip all text and underlying image data.

The problem with this strategy is that the conversion process (from PDF to PNG or whatever other format) loses quality. I tried editing the PDF in gimp but it didn't work right away.

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Right-click your other highlighted section (ex: what you highlighted with the "Area Highlight" tool) and repeat the process.

The above command will convert all images found in the PDF to their corresponding embedded image types, and store them in files like this:

Open each image and you should see only sanitized image content, with black boxes over the images and text wherever you drew black boxes over the images and text.

I add to the list: Krita. Had no quality loss, because when importing PDF you can define dpi (set it to 300, as @Sergey said). After editing hit "Export as PDF". Lastly, I find Krita more intuitive than Gimp, after having been a long time user of Photoshop.

Go to File --> Print --> choose "Print to File (PDF)" as the printer from the drop-down menu --> click "Options" at the bottom-left of the window --> choose the "PDF Options" tab --> check the box for "Force rasterization" [VERY IMPORTANT!] --> set your desired "Output file" path --> click "Print". Here are what my settings look like:

(Don't be scared by the long answer. This takes just a couple minutes once you've done it a couple times. I provide a lot of detail to make you understand the process the first time is all).

I remember one time me and a colleague had to find a way to edit a couple of pdf, We ended up using Gimp. I will comment you the details ... we open the pdf directly with gimp (in a terminal)

In terms of this question, from version 8 onwards it has a manual redaction feature. Users can select a text object and redact it. The content is removed from the PDF and replaced with a black rectangle.

Lastly, if you want to convert your sanitized PDF back into a searchable PDF, get my tool here: pdf2searchablepdf. Then install it like this:

Basically what you are trying to do is highlight/annotate a PDF, but with some flexibility towards marker opacity and colour (you mentioned you don't need to censor/remove something, merely redact). Have you taken a look at answers here: How can I highlight or annotate PDFs?

I was able to open a PDF file in Inkscape, draw a rectangle over a piece of text and print it out. Inkscape is a vector editor so no rasterization involved. Some fonts looked wrong though - probably because the document was created on Windows machine with fonts which are absent on mine.

In addiction it as me to open redacted files (I like read to check whether all) and as to upload to Scribd with my other script - scribd_up, so now I can redact a lot of PDF files very efficiently.

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With Xournal you'd choose "Annotate PDF", then use a solid black marker to mask the parts you want to redact, and "Export to PDF".

I had to print a couple of PDFs recently to send to someone, but I wanted to redact (black out) a couple small bits of text.

Okay, if your document is really sensitive, you don't want it going anywhere before redaction. Here are some web tools that may have good policy. The thing with these, is they have businesses aimed at corporate clients and offer these services to showcase their SDKs. Make sure to read their terms of service.

Forces the rasterization of each page into an image before printing it. This usually gives somewhat worse results, but is useful when printing documents that appear to print incorrectly.

Use LibreOffice Draw for that quick editing that you are looking for. After you are done you can save it as LibreOffice Draw format or export it again to PDF format (File>Export as PDF)

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Open the PDF with the free tool PDF-Xchange PDF Viewer. Black out the text to be redacted using black rectangles. Print. That will get you easy, high-quality "fake" redaction.

To verify that boxed-over images are gone, we are doing to extract the underlying images from the PDF. This is not The same as converting a PDF to images. For the latter, see my answer here. But for the former, which is what we want this time, see @pl1nk's answer here. Here are the steps:

The best way I have found to do this is to use http://www.pdfescape.com. You can annotate, add text and images, draw a "whiteout" rectangle around stuff you want to redact, and you can quickly download and save it. It also works really well with multi-page documents, which is something that lots of other solutions don't work well with. For example, if you open a multi-page document in Gimp or Inkscape, you will only be able to open one page at a time. The process is much faster in PDFescape. The whole process for me to redact a 2-page document takes less than a minute.

There are some stories on the internet suggesting that Xournal rasterises the text in the exported PDF (thanks for pointing this out, MHC). This does not seem to be true: with simple annotations, the text remains selectable and searchable and the file size does not increase by much (it increased from 205 kb to 220 kb in the example below).

One of the highest rated answers recommends Xournal, which has not been mentioned here and would be my weapon of choice. It is a tool that allows you to make handwritten notes but has extra features allowing you to annotate a PDF. By default it'll save your annotations as a separate file but also allows you to export the annotated PDF as a new PDF. This should maintain the layout, fonts, etc.

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Right-click your highlighted text and go to "Properties" --> click the colored box and choose the black color, and set the "Opacity" to 100% (important, I think) to fully hide the contents underneath it. Also check the box for "Set Current Properties as Default" so that future highlight actions will use these settings. Here are my settings:

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If you hover your mouse over the "Force rasterization" check box in Okular, you'll see a little popup context window that says:

Note that any method that does not involve rasterization is only acceptable if you're going to print the redacted document on paper and not distribute it electronically, as the text still can be retrieved from under blackouts.

Open those images and you will see unsanitized image content, with no black boxes anywhere! You will see the full, original images.

Use the "Highlight" button at the top left to highlight sensitive searchable text. Or, use the "Area Highlight" button at the top right to draw boxes to highlight sensitive text or images. Here is an image showing some areas of a PDF I've just highlighted to redact. I've circled the 3 buttons at the top, and my Foxit Reader highlight redactions are in yellow:

Install it via the Ubuntu Software Center (libreoffice-pdfimport ) or via a terminal with sudo apt-get install libreoffice-pdfimport.

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If using LibreOffice to create PDF file, open doc in LibreOffice , highlight text to be redacted, right click and select character, select Background and click on black. Export to PDF.

Once you are finished editing, we did not save the changes, instead of that we print in to pdf file ... That seemed to work ok.

You now have both the "Highlight" tool and the "Area Highlight" tool configured to apply black, 100% opaque highlighting to cover up sensitive parts of your document. Use these tools to redact your document. Save as you go.