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I've always operated under the assumption that nothing in a PDF is secure, and that the only safe way to redact something from one is to print it and rescan it.
by reilly3000 7y ago
I've always operated under the assumption that nothing in a PDF is secure, and that the only safe way to redact something from one is to print it and rescan it. Convince me otherwise?
- bepvte 7y agoI believe that if you edit the pdf so that the thing you are redacting is no longer in the pdf file, it is safely redacted. Printing a pdf and rescanning a pdf breaks text selection and screen readers, and basically makes it into a fancy PNG.
- munk-a 7y agoThere is a bunch of data in PDFs that may have previously been visible but is no longer. I know that there are also fun meta-data attributes embedded on a per-page and per document basis - and also that PDFs can be portfolio documents where such a document will often contain no longer referenced PDFs that became irrelevant to the PDF. The file format is pretty crazy.
- captn3m0 7y agoThere are a few redaction tools that do exactly this, but in software. You get a PNGish version, which you redact and combine back to PDF