The context for OP posting this is that many of the recently-released Epstein documents were PDFs "redacted" by being drawn on top of.

I wasn't sure of this, even though sometimes you'd see remains of the original characters near rectangles edges.. does this mean the leaked documents have been de-redacted ?

Also good for UFO/UAP/"anomalous phenomena" documents and remote viewing PDFs for what it's worth :)

Is there a good free tool to properly redact PDFs? My workflow is to place black annotation rectangles on top and then print as PDF with "force rasterization" on. The resulting PDF files then just consist of pages with one image each. But this tends to be really suboptimal, because it's usually a grayscale or color rasterization, so file sizes are very large vs. monochrome PDFs with CCITT G3/G4 compression (which is absolutely what you want for text content, excellent compression and lossless). Post-processing PDFs to convert them to CCITT is rather annoying and I only know of CLI ways.