You're publishing a case study about an unhappy client. The story stays, the name goes. Manually checking every page for 'James Wilson' and 'Mr. Wilson' and 'JW' would take hours.
Find-and-redact across the whole document is the answer. Flint does it.
Search every variation
Open redact PDF, use find-and-redact. Enter the name and Flint marks every occurrence on every page. Apply. Then search again for variations: 'Mr. Wilson', 'James', 'JW'. Each search adds to the redaction set. The applied result has every variation gone.
Watch for partial matches
Searching 'Jim' could match 'Jim' but also 'Jimmy' or names containing those letters. Use word-boundary matching (regex: '\\bJim\\b') to avoid false hits. Or visually inspect Flint's matches before applying — anything that highlighted shouldn't be redacted should be deselected.
Anonymise with replacement, not just redaction
Sometimes you want 'James Wilson' replaced with 'the client' rather than blanked out. Pure redaction leaves a black box; replacement requires edit PDF to type new text after removing the original. Two-step: redact, then edit to add replacement text. Or use redaction's 'replace with text' option if available.
Check metadata, comments, form fields
Names can hide in PDF metadata, sticky notes/annotations, form fields, and even file properties. Open edit PDF to inspect all of these and clear anywhere a name persists. Final sanity check: open the saved file in a different reader and search for the name. If nothing's found, you're clean.
FAQ
Will redacted names still appear in search engines?
If you've already published the PDF, search engines may have indexed the old version. Re-publish with the redacted file and request reindexing if applicable.
Can I redact a name in scanned PDFs?
If OCR has been run, the text layer can be searched. Pure image scans need manual selection of the visible name.
What about names embedded in images (signatures)?
Manual selection over the signature image — Flint blacks out the image data in that area.
How do I know I caught every variation?
Search the redacted output for each variation. If any matches return content, redact again.
Find, mark, apply, verify. Redact names.