Inkfish FAQ

Names, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, dates of birth, ID numbers (such as SSN, passport, personal identifiers from Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands (ID card, NIR, DNI, codice fiscale, BSN), and the Chinese resident ID), bank account, IBAN, routing and card numbers. Which ID formats are checked depends on the rule packs you have on.

Yes. Inkfish deletes the covered text from the page content of a new copy, then reopens that copy to confirm that no text can be extracted under any cover. If a check fails, it names the page and offers to redo that page as an image.

Yes. Pages without a text layer are read with Apple's on-device text recognition (Vision) in English, Chinese and German, and findings on those pages come from the recognized words.

Findings at or above the confidence threshold, 85% by default, start ticked. Change the threshold in Settings › General, or tick and untick items yourself before inking.

Click Mark area and drag a box over anything on the page, or use Add rule to find every occurrence of a word or pattern in the file.

Inkfish 1.0 is free. There are no in-app purchases, no ads and no watermark on your files.

Yes. Everything in version 1.0, including every safety feature, stays free. A later version may add an optional one-time purchase for batch processing.

No. The app is built without network access, so detection, text recognition and redaction can only run on your Mac. There is no account and no analytics.

No. It always writes a new file with "-redacted" added to the name, by default on your Desktop (you can change this in Settings › Output), and leaves the original untouched.

No tool can promise that on its own. The rule packs list kinds of personal data named in laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and PIPL as a reference. Inkfish helps you find and remove private information; it is not legal advice.

If the file is password-protected, Inkfish asks for the password. If it reports a damaged file, open it in Preview, export it as a new PDF and try again.

Inkfish runs in the macOS sandbox, so it needs your permission once for the folder it saves into, the Desktop by default. Select the folder in the panel that appears and click Allow, or set Save to in Settings › Output to Same folder as original or Ask every time.

Choose Redo page as image. Inkfish turns that page into a flat image with the covers burned in, so no text layer is left on it.

Name detection uses Apple's on-device language model. It works best for English and Chinese names; Chinese names may start unticked. In German documents Inkfish also finds names that follow a title or label such as Herr, Frau, Dr., Mieter or Vertreten durch; a name without one may be missed. Use Mark area or Add rule for any name it misses.

An open vector drawing such as a drawn signature, a chart line or a check mark can gain a thin closing line. With Hidden text and layers on (the default, in Settings › Redaction) this can happen on any page of the safe copy; with it off, only on pages that have a cover. Table lines and underlines are restored in most PDFs, but lines drawn with a pattern or inside optional layers are not restored and can go missing. This only changes how the drawing looks: the covered text is still removed. No setting avoids it yet, so open the safe copy and check pages with such drawings before you share it.

In the safe copy a few Chinese characters, such as 门, 长, 车 and 风, look exactly the same on the page but are stored as their radical forms, so copying or searching them gives a different character (门 can come out as ⻔). This comes from the system PDF framework, not from the redaction: the covered text is still removed, and your original file is not changed.