Preview, checklist and download

Overview

Preview and Download are the last two steps of the redaction loop. Preview shows you exactly what the saved file will look like, with sensitive text replaced by clean black boxes. The pre-download checklist then surfaces items worth a second look, and the Save dialog lets you name the file before it is written.

How to finish a document

Preview the final output

Press P or click Preview in the sidebar footer to hide the review markup and see the real black-box output. Click Review to return to the markup view if you want to adjust anything. Preview and Review are reversible as many times as you like. Nothing is permanent until you click Download.

The pre-download checklist

Before you download, Lex Cloak shows a short checklist tailored to this document. Just the checks that apply, such as signatures it found or pages where the text was hard to read. Each entry is a warning, not a block, with the one exception below, so you can resolve a finding or download once you have reviewed it. The checklist appears every time on purpose, because the few seconds it takes is the step that catches the easy misses.

One line reads the file name rather than the page. Detection runs on what is printed in the document, so a name like Jane-Doe-MRN-4417.pdf is never scanned, and the details in it survive a redaction that took the same details off the pages themselves. The confirmations below have always asked you to check the file name. This line is the one that tells you there is something to find: it appears only when Lex Cloak can see a value it is about to redact sitting in the file name too, and it points you at the Save dialog, which is where the name can still be changed. It names the category, such as a name or a record number, and never the value itself.

One case gets its own line. If Lex Cloak detected high-confidence details that belong to a category you have turned off for this document, those details will not be redacted, so the checklist asks you to confirm that specifically, separate from the general confirmations and not covered by Select all. You can Review & include them in one click, or acknowledge and download anyway when leaving that category off is what you intend. The final call stays yours.

The one thing the checklist waits for is work that is still running: the scan itself, or the signature check and the barcode check that run in the background after it. A file saved before that work finishes would miss whatever it had not reached yet, such as a barcode that repeats a record number you redacted, or, if the scan itself is still going, everything. So while any of it is running, the checklist says so and Continue stays off until it lands. You do not have to wait: choose Stop the scan or Stop the check, and the checklist asks you to confirm, on its own line and outside Select all, what did not finish.

A document whose scan was stopped or failed can still be downloaded. Nothing on it was detected, so only what you marked yourself will be redacted, and the checklist asks you to confirm exactly that before it lets you continue. Scan now, on the same line, runs the scan instead.

Download the redacted PDF

Click Download to save the redacted copy. A Save dialog from your operating system lets you choose the name and folder, and fills in a name for you built from the original: cloaked_ followed by the file name you started with. That dialog is the one place the name can be edited, which is worth using when the original name carries a detail you just redacted. The saved copy has the detected content permanently removed, not just hidden behind a black box, and your original file is untouched. If you have seen redactions fail elsewhere, here is why a black box alone does not redact a PDF.

On a large document the export shows its own progress while it works: a checklist that ticks through refining the redaction boxes, applying them, and finishing the file, next to one overall completion percentage. So a long save never looks stuck.

If a safety check finds a problem in the finished file, Lex Cloak stops and tells you what it found instead of saving. That message stays on screen until you close it, so you can read it, copy it, or come back to it. It names the specific thing it found, and where a page is worth checking it tells you which page.

These checks are a second opinion, not the last word. When there is a redacted copy to give you, the same message offers to export it anyway once you confirm you understand what was found. A check can be wrong about whether something matters, and you can see the document it cannot. The one case with no such offer is when the redaction itself failed, because then there is no redacted copy in existence to hand over.

Download several documents as a ZIP

When you have more than one document open, Download All saves them together as a single ZIP file. Each document keeps its own redactions, and you review each one before exporting the set.

If Lex Cloak cannot stand behind one of the files, it stops on that one and leaves it out of the ZIP rather than saving it. The other documents still save normally. You will see which files were left out and why, the file list marks them as not saved, and the ZIP itself carries a short note listing them, so the set still makes sense if you open it somewhere else later.

Two documents with the same filename both make it into the ZIP. The second one gets a number added to its name, so nothing is quietly overwritten.

Each document keeps its own name inside the ZIP, with _cloaked added before the extension. The Save dialog names the archive, not the files inside it, so if a file name itself carries something you just redacted you have three ways to handle it, easiest first: rename the file after you unpack the archive, rename it on your computer before you add it to Lex Cloak, or download that one document on its own and name it in the Save dialog. You do not need to leave it out of the batch.

What the checklist warnings mean

• Signatures found. The signature scan flagged handwritten signatures. Each is marked for redaction. Review them by eye and use draw mode to cover anything the scan could not handle before you download.
• Detected details left turned off. Lex Cloak found high-confidence details in a category you have muted, so they will not be redacted. This one asks you to confirm on its own line, outside Select all. Use Review & include to add them, or acknowledge and download anyway if leaving that category off is intentional for this document.
• Hard-to-read pages. Some pages had low scan quality, so detection may have missed text on them. Give those pages a closer look before you download.
• Excluded matches. A summary of matches you turned off, by scope. Useful for confirming that an Always exclusion really is something you always want kept.