Acrobat for Legal Professionals

December 16, 2005

Redacting PDFs

Redaction, by definition, means removing information from documents. In the old days of paper, xacto knives were used to cut text from the paper and it was then photocopied with a black sheet of paper behind it.

As numerous folks have found out, covering up information in an electronic file is not the same as deleting it.

Note: This article was written before Acrobat 8 shipped which includes robust tools for detecting improper redactions (Acrobat 8 Standard and Pro) and full-featured Redaction tools (Acrobat 8 Professional).<\p>

There have been numerous cases recently where improper redaction led to accidental disclosures:

  • A PDF distributed by the US government contained covered over text that was fully accessible. In this case, the user authored a document in Microsoft Word and used Word's Tables and Borders toolbar to set the background color to black. Thus, black text on a black background which was not visually readable, but does not eliminate the data. When the user converted the document to PDF, a simple search of the document revealed the text. Note here that Acrobat worked as advertised properly preserving every element of the document.
  • Another case of an improperly redacted PDF was related to me by a large law firm's trainer. She had added black filled rectangle annotations using Acrobat to a document and secured it using a password to prevent changes. She quickly learned that you can simply turn off printing of Annotations in Acrobat's print window!

Acrobat annotations are not meant for redaction. They are used for notes, comments and callouts.

The best way to redact a PDF is to use PDF Redaction software.

Appligent http://www.appligent.com offers Redax for Acrobat. There are two versions- Redax and Redax Lite. These operate as plug-ins within Acrobat and allow you to completely and securely delete text and graphics from the document.

It has a variety of other features such as search and redact, etc. We like it so much at Adobe, we sell it in the Adobe on-line store!

There is another alternative which doesn't require any special software, but I do not recommend it unless you are . . .

  • Really, really careful
  • Seldom need to redact

  1. Go to Tools-->Drawing Markups-->Rectangle
  2. Draw a rectangle to cover the offending text/graphic
  3. Right Click on the rectangle and set the Fill to Black. Click OK.
  4. Select the rectangle and choose "Set Properties to default" so that each additional rectangle will be solid black
  5. Alternately, you can use the Highlight tool to highlight text (if you have a PDF Normal or Searchable PDF). Set the highlight color to Black.

rectangle_properties.gif

At this point, all you have done is to cover up the items you want to redact.

To *really* get rid of the information, you need to flatten the file.

  1. Go to File-->Save As
  2. Choose TIFF from the Type pop-up at the bottom of the dialog box

Acrobat will save each page of your PDF as a separate, sequentially numbered TIFF file.

You can now recombine the TIFFs into a single, image-only PDF.

  1. In Acrobat 7 Standard or Pro, click the Create PDF button on the toolbar
  2. Choose "From multiple files"
  3. Click the browse button and navigate to the location you saved the files

create_multiple.gif

If you have a lot of these to do, you can Save to TIFF and create PDF from TIFF in batch using Acrobat Professional.

Redaction Futures

I frequently hear from my law firm and corporate legal customers that they would like Acrobat to include native redactions tools. To me, there is no doubt that the customer demand is there. I hope that someday Adobe will include best-of-breed redaction tools in our products.

Until then, I'm interested in hearing your opinion which I will share with our product team. Let me know in detail how you could envision redaction tools working in Acrobat. I look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Rick Borstein at 12:39 AM on December 16, 2005

Comments

varun — 10:23 AM on December 25, 2005

acrobat is very useful for everyboy.


HAPPY CHRISMAS

Andrea — 04:16 PM on January 03, 2006

I agree that a redaction tool would be extremely helpful for lawyers (and other business professionals, no doubt). I know that my firm has spent time and money struggling with this issue.

Pat — 12:41 PM on January 04, 2006

Instead of saving as TIFF, could you instead choose to select and delete the redacted text with the Acrobat "Touchup Text Tool" after you've added the black rectangle?

Rick Borstein — 11:27 AM on January 05, 2006

Regarding using the Touchup Text Tool for redacting. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. For one, this tool can only work on one line of text at a time. Second, when you delete text with this tool, the text to the right of it moves to the left, just as if you deleted text in Word or WordPerfect. You could hit the spacebar to move the text back over, but the appearance of the document will have been compromised, possibly leaving you open to spoilation issues in discovery. The best solution if you have a lot of PDFs to redact is Appligen't Redax.

Deneise Speakman — 12:02 PM on January 26, 2006

Actually, I use this method often. However, instead of saving to tif as you suggested, I find it easier to just print to pdf, which does the same thing.

RICK's REPLY

NO, NO, NO!

This does NOT eliminate the data from the PDF. If you choose the Touchup Object Tool, you can actually select and delete the mark-ups revealing the underlying text.

Rory Allen — 10:11 PM on January 31, 2006

Appligent software www.appligent.com makes an affordable redaction tool.

Rick's Reply:
Yes, that is why I mentioned it in the article.

Robb — 07:01 PM on March 20, 2006

I HATE (with a capital "H") using Redax -- it's complicated and time-consuming. I would much prefer simply drawing a big black box. However, I'm such a Acrobat-deficient user that I can't figure out how to print my nice black boxes on the document without printing a separate "comments" sheet. Is there any way simply to print the document + my black boxes, and leave out the comments sheet?
--- Rick's Reply---
In the Print window, make sure it is set to "Document and Markups" in the pop-up menu just under the Properties button (Windows). It is in the Print window on the Mac, but a slightly different location.

Duff Johnson — 02:54 PM on March 21, 2006

A clarification... Printing your annotated PDF to another PDF WILL "work", but ONLY if you "print as image" (an Advanced option). This is functionally the same as Saving to TIFF, with the added advantage of keeping the whole process (perceptually) in the "realm" of PDF.

Hmm... Adobe could easily add a "print to redacted (image) PDF" option to the Print menu, a command to be invoked after using the "black highlighter" approach you indicate. Ideally, this process would optimize pages as it rasterized them based on content (JBIG2 and JPEG, as required).

It would be a whole lot more streamlined that saving to TIFFs or JPEGS (that's a pain right there), and reimporting.

Such an approach is still a cheesy option compared to Redax, but this method would allow Adobe to keep it all "in PDF", which is more than can be said for the TIFF approach. You could go further, and JUST rasterize the page-area covered by the annotations... but then, you might as well add Appligent to AdobeMedia, and do it right.

Shea Reinke — 09:34 AM on March 23, 2006

Printing a pdf to the pdf printer is never a recomended workflow. Doing so can generate irregularities in the postscript and lead to a corrupted pdf file.

--- Rick's Reply ---
I haven't seen this issue myself. I know many people who do with no problem. This might be more of an issue with really complex documents, but legal files tend to pretty simple.

Rather than do that why don't you simply use the touch up tools to select and delete the information that need to be removed?

--- Rick's Reply---
That's an option, but in the legal market, a change (redaction) that leads to movement of any other item on the page could open the firm to evidentiary spoilage.

Redacting and Strikethroughs. As far as I am concerned, both of these need to go the way of the dodo. They are irrelevant (and problematic) without paper.

--- Rick's Reply---
In so far as PDFs are a representation of a paper page, how can that be? Courts order firms to redact information, it's not like they have a choice. Redaction needs to happen on the original piece of evidence and saved as a new file. It's not OK to present the information as if the missing items were never there. That is evidentiary spoilage.

--- Rick's Notes--
This was a very long post and I have edited out some of the text to keep the issues clear.

Stan — 11:04 AM on May 30, 2006

Here's a recent filing by AT&T lawyers with intended redacted portions. On Acrobat, you can simply highlight the redacted text, right-click and copy, and paste onto a word processor.
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/att.not.redacted.brief.052606.pdf
-------------- Rick's Reply ------------
Yup. I took a look at the file. Looks like Borders and Shading was used in Word to cover up the text with a black bar. Then, the .doc file was converted to PDF. The text is still there in Word, so the text is still there in Acrobat. User error!

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