How To (Properly) Redact a PDF

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! Redacted! 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 revealed everything 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.¹

You can buy 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 free 30-day trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Adobe provides an overview 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.²

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 by. There are a few alternatives, though. If you are on a Windows machine, consider NitroPDF, which will run you $159. You can get a free two-week trial to check it out. Foxit makes Foxit Redactor, 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.

1. Sure, you already have Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, because everyone does, but you can’t perform redactions with it. ↩

2. Nonsense text for this document courtesy of Office Ipsum. ↩

How To (Properly) Redact a PDF was originally published on Lawyerist.com.