How to Redact Text in a PDF

Introduction

Redaction means obscuring or hiding text to conceal sensitive information that would otherwise be divulged.

Sensitive information may cover a broad spectrum of categories, which include:

• PII - Personally Identifiable Information
• PHI - Protected Health Information
• Trade secrets
• Intellectual properties
• Financial information

When developing a data privacy strategy, the data redaction is considered a key factor. However, there are two important challenges revolving around the redaction process:

• Identifying the sensitive information.
• Applying the appropriate redaction technique.

Redaction techniques

When dealing with a PDF document, the data redaction consists of selecting a block of text and replacing the latter with a black rectangle. This will completely remove this block of text from the PDF document, in the same ...