If you need to supply or publish redacted documents, and PDF is a suitable format for them, Acrobat Pro DC looks like a thoroughly reliable platform with which to prepare them.Acrobat X Suite build attractive materials and interact with Adobe Acrobat X Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS5 and 4 other useful tools. In my text case, the final document size fell to 507 KB, which seems much more reasonable. Open the duplicate in Acrobat, sanitise it a second time, and save. I therefore recommend that you complete redacting and sanitising, then duplicate the document produced by that. When Acrobat saved the first fully redacted and sanitised version of my test document, its size doubled, from 581 KB to 994 KB, which seems very worrying. There was a time, long ago, when the text content of PDF files was stored as plain text within the PDF file, and you could open a PDF and check it using a text editor such as BBEdit. My biggest concern with Acrobat’s redaction features is that they are almost impossible to audit. Note that this even includes macOS extended attributes, although they are not explicitly listed here, such as the ‘quarantine’ flag. When you click on the Sanitize Document tool, this is the list provided. The final step is to strip everything else from the document which could contain information which shouldn’t be released. But Acrobat found both: this is the text hidden behind the image. Although not impossible to detect manually, they would normally be overlooked, and released in the published document. Viewing hidden text is also excellent: the PDF I was using had two sections of hidden text, one concealed behind an image, and the other in text coloured white inserted between paragraphs. My version of Acrobat Pro DC (up to date) consistently quit unexpectedly whenever I tried to show the preview of the document metadata, though. Once hidden information has been located, it is shown by type in a sidebar to the left. Whenever you apply redactions to make them permanent, Acrobat kindly offers to proceed to the next step, of locating and removing hidden information. Then the underlying content is removed, leaving just a filled black box to show where the content was. This seems clumsy, but is actually the best way to do this robustly.īy default, intended redactions are shown in red boxes until you make them permanent.
Because applying redaction removes all trace of the selected text/graphics, you should then check those intentions before making them permanent. First, you work through the document marking up the areas for redaction. The first time that you use the Mark for Redaction tool, Acrobat explains in this dialog how the process works. You can add your own codes to cater for non-US purposes. If you need to add tags to explain why the redaction has taken place, select the Properties tool and you can set that up in this dialog. If you’re content with the standard black marker approach to redaction, that is the default. Sanitising handles all the other things which could trip you up, like metadata and odd bits of data hanging around in the document file. Removing hidden information tackles those elements which you can’t see to redact, but which Acrobat detects. Redact obliterates selected sections of text and/or graphics, normally using filled black rectangles, just like a black marker. Make a point of using them each in that order. This adds a toolbar with three main actions: mark and redact, remove hidden information, and sanitize the document. Select the Redact tool, and add it to your document view. Like all the more useful tools in Acrobat, you have to open the Tools view in order to find and engage them. There are similar tools available in some other advanced PDF editors too. Adobe also provides details in its online user guide.Īdobe only provides its redaction tools in paid-for versions of Acrobat, and those described here are part of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. This article works through preparing a document for publication using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. I wrote that PDF is one of the few formats which is well supported, and is of course a popular medium for many. Yesterday, I pointed out some of the pitfalls of trying to redact documents and prepare them for release to others, or publication.
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