@thrain/blackout

Permanently remove text from a PDF, from the command line.

Drawing a black rectangle over text does not remove it. The rectangle is an annotation or an overlay; the characters stay in the content stream underneath, where any text extractor recovers them in one line of code. That is not a hypothetical — it is how redaction failures leak, most famously in filings that were published with the "redacted" names still selectable.

Blackout rasterises every page, burns the bars into the pixels, and rebuilds the file from the images. The text layer does not survive. Then it reads its own output back and counts the characters still extractable; if that number is not zero, it fails instead of writing a file.

Everything happens on your machine. There is no upload, no API call, and no network access at any point — including the license check, which verifies a signature offline.

Use

npx @thrain/blackout check filing.pdf
npx @thrain/blackout redact filing.pdf --detect ssn,email --out clean.pdf
npx @thrain/blackout redact filing.pdf --term "Jane Doe" --term "Acme Corp"

check reports what would be redacted and writes nothing. redact writes a new file and never modifies the input.

Options

| Flag | Meaning | |---|---| | --detect <list> | ssn, card, email, phone, or all / none. Defaults to all — unless --term is given and --detect is not, in which case only the terms match. | | --term <string> | Literal text to redact, case-insensitive. Repeatable. | | --out <file> | Output path. Defaults to <input>-redacted.pdf. | | --force | Allow overwriting an existing output file. | | --json | Machine-readable result on stdout. | | --license <token> | Pro license token. Also read from BLACKOUT_LICENSE. | | --quiet | Suppress the human-readable summary. | | -V, --version | Print the version and exit. |

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 failure, 2 usage error. With --json, failures print {"ok": false, "code": "...", "error": "..."} on stdout.

Error codes worth branching on: PAGE_LIMIT (over the free limit, no license supplied) and LICENSE_INVALID (a token was supplied and failed verification). These are deliberately distinct — "buy a license" is the wrong response to a token that is merely mistyped or truncated.

For agents

--json is stable and includes per-category counts, page count, and extractableChars — which is verified to be 0 on every successful redaction.

npx @thrain/blackout check filing.pdf --json

{
  "ok": true,
  "command": "check",
  "pages": 1,
  "total": 6,
  "byCategory": [{ "id": "ssn", "label": "Social Security numbers", "count": 1 }],
  "licensed": false,
  "licenseState": "none",
  "freePageLimit": 10,
  "withinFreeLimit": true
}

licenseState is "none", "invalid", or "valid". "invalid" means a token was supplied and failed verification — worth surfacing to whoever supplied it rather than quietly running as free tier.

There is also an MCP server — @thrain/blackout-mcp — exposing redact_pdf and check_pdf over the Model Context Protocol.

Limits

Free up to 10 pages per document. A Pro license ($25, one-time) removes the limit; the same license works in the browser app. Pass it with --license or set BLACKOUT_LICENSE.

Buy at blackout.thrain.ai, then expand "Use Blackout from the terminal or an AI agent" on the Pro screen to copy your token. It is verified offline against an embedded public key, so licensed runs still make no network calls.

Also on the web

https://blackout.thrain.ai — the same engine, with a visual editor, FOIA and privilege exemption codes, numbered markers and an appended redaction log.

Thrain LLC · [email protected]