Redacting text and images in a PDF file
Table of Contents
Customizing the redaction marks
Acrobat offers several ways to modify the appearance of the redaction marks by using custom colors, text, and specific codes. There aren’t any government regulations regarding the color or text used in a redaction mark. The ability to customize how redaction marks appear means you can use an in-house color scheme to represent the types of material redacted, such as instances of different names redacted in different colors.
Before selecting text for redaction, follow these steps to customize the redaction marks:
- Click Redaction Properties on the Redaction toolbar to open the Redaction Tool Properties dialog. The default settings specify a solid black fill for the redaction marks.
- Select Use Overlay Text to activate the rest of the fields in the dialog (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Choose custom colors and text instead of the default black blocks for redacting.
- Select options for the text including:
- Selecting a Redacted Area Fill Color if you’d like the areas filled with color other than black
- Choosing Font, Font size or whether to use auto-sizing, and Font color
- Positioning for the text and whether to repeat the text
- Typing custom text in the field that is used on the page
- Click OK to close the dialog. Continue with the redaction process as described in the previous steps. When the redaction is applied, you see the custom color and text (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Use a combination of color and text as redaction marks.
Often, you may need to read through many documents looking for the same content to redact. Acrobat 8 Professional offers an efficient way to handle that task.
