Redacted For Mac
Redacting a PDF seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world. Just draw one of those black boxes over the text you need to have disappeared, and voila! Except that your recipient can actually just place their cursor over that part of the document, copy, and paste it into a new document.
This is exactly what happened a few years ago in a patent infringement lawsuit involving Apple and Samsung. The judge’s decision contained redactions, but a simple copy and paste beneath. If you want to make sure you’ve actually redacted something before sharing it, there are several methods—all of which are more secure than the black box. Redacting Using Adobe Acrobat Pro Redacting in Adobe Acrobat Pro is very simple. The main problem with this method is you need Adobe Acrobat Pro. It is not cheap. You the desktop software (Mac or Windows) for $449, or you can subscribe to it for $14.99 a month if you agree to a year-long commitment. Acrobat Pro is $24.99 if you want to go month-to-month.
The latter model is suboptimal, as you’re basically renting the software. But renting does get you access to Adobe’s Document Cloud service, which adds features like the ability to fill out, sign, and send forms from your tablet. If redaction is a real rarity (as in a one-time thing), you can download a of Adobe Acrobat Pro. Adobe provides an of how to redact documents and remove sensitive information. It really only takes a few clicks. First, open the document you wish to redact, go to the Tools menu, then select Redact. Doing so will bring up the redaction tools when you hop back to your document.
Select Mark for Redaction and Adobe will pop up a handy reminder that redacting is a two-step process. From there, just highlight the text you want to redact.
Acrobat will outline it for you in bright red. Click Apply to redact but first, Acrobat will ask if you are really sure you want the material gone. Click OK and your text will disappear forever. Acrobat will then ask you if you want to find and remove any other hidden information. You should always say yes to this. Acrobat is asking if you want to remove the metadata, and you always want to remove the metadata.
In this document, there’s nothing particularly secret, but the metadata does let you know I’m on a Mac and that I made this PDF with Microsoft Word originally. Scrubbing the metadata ensures that any author information, revision information, or anything similar gets completely excised from the document. There is no reason to ever hand over a PDF before you’ve scrubbed the metadata. Alternatives To Adobe Acrobat Pro $449 for Acrobat Pro is a pretty steep price. Unfortunately, super-cheap PDF redacting is hard to come. There are a few alternatives, though. If you are on a Windows machine, consider NitroPDF, which You can get a free two-week trial to check it out.
Foxit makes which is software solely to redact Microsoft Word documents. It’s an Office plug-in, so you access the redaction tools within Office itself, which is handy, and it’s only $39.95. However, Redactor only works on Windows and only works within Office, so it is limited to documents you create (or already have in an Office format), not PDFs you’ve received.
Old-School Redacting Sometimes low-tech (or no tech at all) is the easiest-and cheapest-approach. Print out your PDF, black marker the heck out of it, scan it, and send it. Just remember you really do need to make a few passes with that black marker to completely obliterate things.
If you don’t feel like printing, marking, and scanning, you can do something similar via computer. Take your PDF and draw a black box in Acrobat Reader or Mac’s Preview or any similar PDF reader. After you do that, take a screenshot of your document. The resulting image is just that—an image—and therefore can’t be manipulated in Word or any other program. The problem with these two methods is that you are left with a document that isn’t searchable or conducive to redlining or commenting. Bottom line: If you are in the type of practice that requires a good deal of document redacting, it is probably best to invest in a dedicated program, even though there will be some sticker shock.
Sure, you already have Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, because everyone does, but you can’t perform redactions with it. Nonsense text for this document courtesy of. You can redact for free using Foxit Reader. Just highlight the text OR draw a rectangle over the text (both options are in the Home menu).
Right click on the text/rectangle, click properties, and set the two color boxes to black (two b/c the colors are for the border and the middle of the rectangle), and save those color selections as the default so you dont have to do that again. Now the blacked out part isnt technically redacted. If you save the file, the box/highlights can be removed. But if you print out a hard copy of the document, this method will obscure whatever text you put it over. Then you just need to re-scan the hard copy. You primary objection seems to be reiterating my last paragraph.
I disagree that it is anything near as clunky as using a marker. This is a method I use several times a week on 1-2 pages.
Redacted For Mac Free
It is very fast and produces very professional looking results (unlike a marker). And best of all it is free and foolproof. You cant accidentally do it the wrong way and disclose confidential information. Acrobat is insanely overpriced.
Even if you wanted an easier process than I described, that reductionist advice is unnecessary. Here’s my method. I believe it works in regular Acrobat, and older versions of Acrobat Pro that don’t have the redaction tool. Get yourself a.jpg that you will use as a redaction box.
It can be a picture of a black rectangle, or whatever. (I know what you’re thinking, but keep reading) 2. “Add Image” the.jpg into the document you want to redact. Adjust the size and position to cover up the text you want redacted. Use the “Remove Hidden Information” option.
In Acrobat Pro IX, it’s under Tools–Protection–Remove Hidden Information. Among other things, it will detect “Hidden text”–whatever is under the redaction box. Make sure that checkbox is ticked, then click “Remove.” 4.
The text underneath the box is now erased. You can double check this by using the “Edit Text & Images” option to move the box and see for yourself.
(Note that if it’s a document with editable or OCR text in the first place, you can just skip the box and just erase the text directly.) It’s a clunky method, but works for the occasional redaction without having to purchase new software beyond regular Acrobat. I would like to add that the redaction tool in Acrobat Pro is fantastic and it is only one of several extremely valuable e-discovery tools in that program.
It also has super easy Bates numbering and will consecutively number large sets of.pdf documents at once, then you can simply change the starting number and do another set. This makes keeping logs easy. It will also search an entire drive or directory of documents for a particular term or phrase within the documents, which is helpful when opposing counsel sends documents titled solely by their Bates number, and on which you can’t do from a normal directory search. It will also OCR multiple documents at the same time and doing so is often faster than doing them one document at a time.
I am still on version 9 so I assume the new versions have even better tools, but these have saved me hours. As a result, the $450 or so for a desktop copy is a good bargain. The cost is equivalent to a couple of billed hours (or less) but the search feature saved me many times that the first time I had to found the “smoking gun” document that I knew had to exist but that was buried in gigabytes of data. There is no way my small client could have paid for that kind of manual search and there is no way I had the time to do it. However, when scrubbing metadata, be aware that some parties (and some government agencies) completely freak out and get quite threatening when faced with a document or set of documents lacking metadata. I’m not saying to include it, I’m just saying that, faced with such a party you will have to argue about it and if they are bigger and have unlimited budgets it can be a powerful tactic.