A black box is not the same as deleting something
A lot of "redaction" tools just paint a rectangle over the sensitive part of the page. That can look finished, but the original text often hasn't gone anywhere, it's just hidden underneath, and depending on the tool it can sometimes still be selected, copied, or extracted from the file.
Delete does the more literal thing: it removes the text or image operation from the page itself. There's no hidden layer to recover, because there's nothing left underneath, and because only that one piece is touched, the rest of the page stays real, selectable text instead of being turned into a flattened image.
Delete text or an image from a PDF
- 1Open the Redact tool and choose or drag in your PDF.
- 2Select the Delete tool, then click any highlighted text run or image you want removed from the file.
- 3Download the PDF. The deleted content is gone from the file, and everything else stays exactly as it was.
Blackout and blur are in the same tool
Deletion is the right call when you want something genuinely gone. Sometimes you'd rather just cover it, a photo, a signature, a block of a scanned document, without needing it removed as cleanly. The sameRedact toolalso has Blackout and Blur modes for exactly that, both flattening the page afterward so nothing underneath can be recovered either.