Acrobat for Legal Professionals

October 05, 2006

Acrobat 8 New Features: Redaction

Redaction is the permanent deletion of data from documents.

Documents are redacted in order to maintain privacy, censor state secrets, or protect intellectual property.

I have written about Redaction previously in this blog ( Redacting PDFs | Redaction Part 2: Something Else You Shouldn't Do ) pointing out the dangers of improperly redacting files.

Acrobat 8 Professional now make many of the dangers and workarounds moot, so this is a welcome tool for the legal market.

The new redaction tools are quite powerful. Let's take a look…

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February 06, 2006

Redaction Part Two: Something Else You Shouldn't Do

I've received several comments about my article on redaction advocating a different method of producing the redacted PDF.

Wouldn't it be easier to just add mark-ups covering information and print it to the AdobePDF print driver instead of saving to a TIFF file?

Doesn't this "flatten" the file eliminating information underneath giving the same results?

Let me state this clearly: No it doesn't!

Read on to learn why . . .

Note: This article was written before Acrobat 8 shipped which includes built-in bullet-proof redaction tools.<\p>

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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>

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