4 ms·

The context for OP posting this is that many of the recently-released Epstein documents were PDFs "redacted" by being drawn on top of.

• formerly_proven 10mo ago
  Is there a good free tool to properly redact PDFs? My workflow is to place black annotation rectangles on top and then print as PDF with "force rasterization" on. The resulting PDF files then just consist of pages with one image each. But this tends to be really suboptimal, because it's usually a grayscale or color rasterization, so file sizes are very large vs. monochrome PDFs with CCITT G3/G4 compression (which is absolutely what you want for text content, excellent compression and lossless). Post-processing PDFs to convert them to CCITT is rather annoying and I only know of CLI ways.
• agumonkey 10mo ago
  I wasn't sure of this, even though sometimes you'd see remains of the original characters near rectangles edges.. does this mean the leaked documents have been de-redacted ?
  • kstrauser 10mo ago
    At least some, yes: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-redactions https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...
    • agumonkey 10mo ago
      yeah i expected every political team, even the low level ones, to be fully aware of naive pdf "edition"... alas, incompetence often does that
      • arthurcolle 10mo ago
        Checks and balances for a more technological era.
        • airstrike 10mo ago
          Survival of the leetest
      • zahlman 10mo ago
        I'm actually surprised not to have yet heard widespread conspiracy theorization that this is deliberate for some inscrutable reason or other.
        • kstrauser 10mo ago
          Something something "chess, not checkers, this proves he has them on the run!"
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
  • k1t 10mo ago
    Yes, in some cases, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
    • agumonkey 10mo ago
      oh that's a beautiful sight hopefully this is straw that breaks the camel's back
      • XorNot 10mo ago
        Why would that be the case? The government isn't redacting "yes we contacted aliens" they're redacting information about military capabilities that might be of use to adversaries.
        • agumonkey 10mo ago
          sorry the title mentioned epstein files, so i was hoping incriminating facts that would accelerate trump's fall
          • jibal 10mo ago
            No reason to be sorry ... you are right and the other person seems quite confused about the context.
        • iberator 10mo ago
          How do you know if its redacted?
• arthurcolle 10mo ago
  Also good for UFO/UAP/"anomalous phenomena" documents and remote viewing PDFs for what it's worth :)