Merge PDFs, redact personal data and compress to a size limit

The Pages and Redact views work on real PDF files. Every result becomes a new document linked to its source — the originals stay untouched, and the lineage in Document details shows how each file was made.

1. Add your PDFs

Press Add files (or A), or drop PDFs anywhere on the workspace. Paperwell reads the page count from each PDF in the browser and runs a quick File check that sends only the first bytes of the file. The library shows, for example, Quote 1.pdf · PDF · 3 pages · 15 KB.

2. Plan the merge

Open Pages (key 5). The first tab, Merge, split & reorder, has an Operation list: Merge PDFs, Split every N pages, Split by ranges, Select / reorder pages, Remove pages and Rotate pages.

With Merge PDFs, tick the files under PDFs to merge and arrange them under Order with Up and Down. The Page plan updates as you go — before anything is uploaded:

6 pages in → one PDF with 6 pages.

The plan shows every output file, where its pages come from and the page sequence (A1, A2, A3, B1 …). For splits and selections it accepts page syntax like 1-3,5,8-end, odd, reverse or 10-1.

Press Run on the server. The pdf-merge-split-reorder tool returns the merged file, which appears in the library as a new document with Made from … in its lineage.

3. Find what to redact

Select the merged PDF and open Redact (key 6). Under What to redact, a PDF without text first offers Extract text; a scanned PDF needs Make it searchable first (OCR).

After the text is extracted, Paperwell lists personal data it found — in our test file 3 personal data items found in the text are not on the list yet: an IBAN, an e-mail address and a phone number. Press Add suggestions to put them into Terms, one per line, and add names yourself (names and addresses are not detected automatically). Also find adds presets for e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IBANs, payment card numbers and dates; More options has regular expressions, areas to black out and case matching.

4. Redact and verify

Press Redact and verify. The secure-pdf-redactor removes the text under every match, rebuilds the affected pages and searches the result again. The Verification table lists every term with Matches before and Matches after. In our run: 12 black boxes on 2 of 6 pages, every term from 2 matches to 0, and the line Verified: none of the terms can be found in the text of the result. The redacted file is added as …-redacted.pdf.

5. Compress for an upload portal

Back in Pages, choose Compress. Pick a Level — Screen (72 DPI, smallest), E-book (150 DPI, balanced), Printer (300 DPI) or Prepress — and enter Size limit in MB, e.g. 5 for a portal. With Also try the other levels and keep the best one that fits, Paperwell tries several levels and marks each result as fits or too large.

The same view converts office files and images to PDF (Convert) and makes scans searchable in up to eight languages (Searchable OCR).

Next: forms, signatures and foreign-language forms.