Protect
Secure a PDF
Three tools, three different questions: stopping the file being opened, removing a protection you hold the key to, and taking information out of the content. All three run inside your browser. For this family that is not a selling point, it is the condition.
All tools
Protecting is not redacting
Protect encrypts the whole document: without the password nobody opens it, but whoever has it sees everything. Redact protects nothing at all and takes information out of the content: the document stays open to everyone, minus what was removed. A contract sent to a third party with one figure masked calls for the second, not the first. A bank statement you are archiving calls for the first.
A black rectangle erases nothing
This is the mistake that has cost entire government departments dearly: placing a black box over text hides only the display. The text is still underneath and comes back on a copy-paste, a search, or an indexing engine. Redaction in Atelier Docs pulls the targeted characters out of the content stream one by one, giving their advance back as an equivalent gap, so the rest of the line does not shift by a point. In images the pixels are blacked out in the image itself, and annotations touching the area are deleted.
What a PDF password is really worth
The format's older protections are bypassed in seconds with a public tool. AES-256 encryption, which Atelier Docs applies, is not forced but guessed, so everything rests on the password you choose. Conversely, many so-called protected documents carry only a permissions password and open with an empty one: try submitting nothing at all before looking further.