The safest way to redact PDFs is to convert them to images, draw black boxes on the sensitive content and create a new PDF from these images. This way the reda

The safest way to redact PDFs is to convert them to images, draw black boxes on the sensitive content and create a new PDF from these images. This way the redacted PDF won't have any metadata from the original (e.g. bookmarks) nor risk any weired PDF redaction bugs. The downside is that your redacted PDF is (probably) larger than the original and isn't accessible. You can mitigate this by using OCR but it still isn't perfect and has a high chance of messing up tables or any special text placement. Some fancy combination of encodings (e.g. using JBIG2 except for images) can probably help with the filesize. --------- The best way to handle sensitive information is probably to use codenames (for people, places, etc) so you can share the original documents without worrying so much.