Accessibility

Redacting text and images in a PDF file

Redaction refers to methods for permanently removing content and replacing it with a space holder of some type, such as a colored box, default text or code, or blank space.

Adobe® Acrobat® 8 Professional includes a set of redaction tools, which can save you time, money, and prevent potential litigation issues.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of working with the commenting tools in Acrobat

To redact text or images from a PDF document, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click/Control-click the toolbar well and choose Redaction from the shortcut menu to open the toolbar.
  2. Click the Mark for Redaction tool. An information dialog opens explaining that you can use the tool to specify content for removal and then use the Apply Redaction tool to complete the task. Click OK to close the dialog. Save a mouse click and a few seconds in the future by selecting “Don’t show again” at the lower left of the dialog before clicking OK.
  3. Move the pointer over the page and drag to select content for redaction. You can select single or multiple words, or entire paragraphs. Each item selected displays a bounding box (Figure 1).

     

    Select text for redaction

    Figure 1: Select words, phrases, or entire paragraphs for redaction.

  4. Move the pointer over a selected object on the page to see how it will look after redaction. In Figure 9.18, the lower paragraph is completely obscured.
  5. When you have finished making the selections, click Apply Redactions . A confirmation dialog opens; click OK to close the dialog and apply the redactions to the file (Figure 2).

     

    selected content is removed

    Figure 2: The selected content is removed from the document.

  6. A second information dialog opens asking if you would also like to examine the document for other content that can be removed. Click Yes to proceed with the document examination as described in the previous section, “Looking Inside a Document.”
  7. Choose File > Save and specify a new name for the file to prevent overwriting the original.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Select Use Overlay Text to activate the rest of the fields in the dialog (Figure 3).

     

    Choose custom colors and text

    Figure 3: Choose custom colors and text instead of the default black blocks for redacting.

  3. 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
  4. 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).

     

    redaction marks

    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.

Searching for content

You can locate and redact certain terms, whether you have one or a thousand documents. The only requirements are:

  • The PDF file(s) must contain searchable text.
  • The PDF file(s) must not be encrypted.

To search a number of documents, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click/Control-click the toolbar well area at the top of the program window and choose Redaction to open the Redaction toolbar.
  2. Click the Search and Redact tool. An information dialog opens, explaining that the program can only find your terms in searchable text. Click OK to close the dialog and display the Search window.
  3. Type the word or phrase to search for in the “What word or phrase would you like to search for?” field (Figure 5).

     

    search function

    Figure 5: Use Acrobat’s powerful Search function to locate terms for redaction.

  4. Specify a search location. If you have a single PDF file active, the option to search "In the current PDF document" is active; if you have a PDF Package open in Acrobat, the option to search "In the entire PDF Package" is included in the list and active by default. Choose another location or click the down arrow and locate the area to search on your hard drive.
  5. Click Search and Redact to conduct the search. The specified files are searched, and the results are displayed in the Search window (Figure 6).

     

    Search window

    Figure 6: Search results are listed by page number in the Search window.

  6. Click the (+) sign next to a document name to open a nested list of occurrences of the word or phrase.
  7. Select the occurrences to mark for redaction. Click Check All to select all the occurrences of the term or phrase.
  8. Click Mark Checked Results for Redaction to show the terms highlighted on the document page. Close the Search window.
  9. To remove the marked items, click Apply Redactions in the Redaction toolbar, and then click OK.
  10. Save the document to preserve the changes.

Image or text?

How do you know if any of your files are composed of images of text rather than captured—and therefore, searchable—text? You don’t know for sure. Here are some ways to handle the situation:

  • Manually check each file in the package.
  • Run a few searches using terms that are common to different documents.
  • Create a batch sequence that automatically checks all the documents assembled for a case to find pages that contain images of text, captures the text, and applies OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
  • Choose Advanced > Document Processing > Export All Images to extract copies of all the images from the PDF Package, and then check the exported images to see if any are full pages. This method is especially quick when the PDF Package doesn’t have any images in it.

Where to go from here

For more information about security features in Acrobat 8, check out these other great resources: