The highlighter (Word & text)
PDFs let you draw coordinate boxes. Word and text documents don’t have fixed page coordinates, so there the same tool works as a highlighter: you select text, and it becomes a redaction.
Turning it on
Section titled “Turning it on”Click the highlighter button in the entries header. The viewer stays on the original document, and now any text you select is treated as something to redact.
Selecting and redacting
Section titled “Selecting and redacting”Select a run of text — a name, a clause, a whole line — and a dialog opens:
- Selected text — what you picked, shown back to you.
- Redaction — how to mask it:
- Black — a solid black fill.
- Grey — a grey fill.
- Custom text — type your own characters or a word (e.g.
REDACTED,███,[CLAUSE REMOVED]).
- Repeat to cover the selection — when on, the fill repeats to roughly match the length of what you selected, so a long phrase gets a long bar instead of a single character.
Click Redact and it becomes a normal entry in the list — same row, same switch, same edit and remove controls as any detected value.
Your choice sticks
Section titled “Your choice sticks”The highlighter remembers your last redaction style and reuses it — even in a new editor window. Set it to Black, repeat on once, and every subsequent highlight defaults to that. Mark several selections in a row without reopening settings each time; the tool stays on until you turn it off.
When to highlight vs. add
Section titled “When to highlight vs. add”The highlighter and Add entry both create new entries from selected text. The difference is intent:
- Highlighter — fast, redaction-only, stays on for marking many spans. Reach for it when you’re sweeping a contract for clauses to black out.
- Add entry — one entry at a time, but with the full range of methods (synthetic, custom value, JS). Reach for it when the missed value should be replaced with something realistic, not just blacked out.
Example: scrubbing a Word contract
Section titled “Example: scrubbing a Word contract”A .docx employment agreement names the employee, a salary figure, and an internal cost-center code the model didn’t recognize. Detection handled the name. For the salary line and the cost-center code, turn on the highlighter, select each, and redact with Black, repeat on. Both become entries; Save to output writes a .docx with the original styling intact and those spans blacked out.
Remember the Word preview is reflowed. You’re selecting content; the saved file keeps its real layout.