It might be feasible, but is this supposed to prevent people from seeing the blacked out words? I’m asking as I’ve encountered similar pdfs before, and it was very easy to simply select and delete the black boxes in Acrobat, revealing all the words beneath...

Adding to what ​@david_r  says above, if the text still exists beneath the black box, users can simply select and copy the text, and paste it in Notepad (or a similar program) to read it.

I just did a quick test: opening such a PDF in Microsoft Word will remove the black boxes and just show all text.

I agree, I’m pretty confident it would be possible to find those original text objects if you dig down into the file with Acrobat Pro or Illustrator.

Better option would be to remove those texts and then rewrite the PDF.

I haven’t used the pdf-writer yet. How easy is it to lay out text? The pdf must look like the original pdfs at the end, just with some text blacked out.

It should not be about people not seeing the text, it should be about people not being able to access the text. So the text should not be present in the PDF at all. Just putting a black box over the text will not accomplish that.

Thanks.

Obviously, FME is not the right tool to solve this task then...

I wouldn’t say that, but rather than blacking out the text you should completely remove if from the file.