Redacting a PDF file
General February 21st, 2008
From the “It shouldn’t be this hard” department, today I scanned a document in to send to someone, and realized it had some sensitive identification numbers on it. I opened the PDF to find a way to redact that information. I poked around Acrobat. I searched around the web.
I found, not to my surprise, to do it right you need to export the PDF to a graphic, mark it out in graphics tools, and reimport to PDF. That’s the “cheap” way. The “easy” way is to purchase Acrobat plugins that pretty much do that for you. Ick. Given how much data is in PDFs these days, there’s really nothing we can do to make this process easier?
I wound up rescanning the document with a blacked out post-it over the UIN field. Because walking back to the scanner (which is a good 100 steps or so from my office,) and rescanning was easier than figuring out how to do that in software. (And that too was one of the top recommendations for redacting a PDF, if you have the hardcopy.)
Yay progress. Things like this make me afraid of becoming a digital librarian.
About
Our solution for this in my department is to put the people who have such PDFs on their computers on the “It’s okay for this person to have SSNs” list.