3 ms·

You'd think the go-to workflow for releasing redacted PDFs would be to draw black rectangles and then rasterize to image-only PDFs :shrug:

by brotchie 10mo ago

shbooms 10mo ago
often times you will have requirements that the documents you release be digitally searchable and so in these cases, this would not be an option
- 8note 10mo ago
  run some ocr on them after to recreate the text layer?
  - albert_e 10mo ago
    With the aggressive push of LLMs and Generative AI ..i am expecting a lot of OCR features to become "smarter" by default, namely go beyond mechanical OCR and start inserting hallucinations and sematically/contextually "more correct" information in OCR output It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to undo some light redactions that are deducible based on context
    - blharr 10mo ago
      Or worse, making up names or information instead of writing the reaction.
- pottertheotter 10mo ago
  This made me think of something I came across recently that’s almost the opposite problem of requiring PDFs to be searchable. A local government would publish PDFs where the text is clearly readable on screen, but the selectable text layer is intentionally scrambled, so copy/paste or search returns garbage. It's a very hostile thing to do, especially with public data!
  - eviks 10mo ago
    Hostile indeed, and also happens in user-facing documents like product manuals!
  - 2ICofafireteam 9mo ago
    I have encountered PDFs that would exhibit this behavior in one browser but not in another. One fun thing I encountered from local government is releasing files with potato quality resolution and not considering the page size. I had a FOI request that returned mainly Arch D sized drawings but they were in a 94 DPI PDF rendered as letter sized. It was a fun conversation trying to explain to an annoyed city employee that putting those large drawings in a 94 DPI letter size page effectively made it 30-ish DPI.
selinkocalar 10mo ago
As someone who's built an entire business on "anti-screenshots" this is brilliant. PDF redaction fails are everywhere and it's usually because people don't understand that covering text with a black box doesn't actually remove the underlying data. I see this constantly in compliance. People think they're protecting sensitive info but the original text is still there in the PDF structure.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Not to mention some PDF editors preserve previous edits in the PDF file itself, which people also seems unaware of. A bit more user friendly description of the feature without having to read the specification itself: https://developers.foxit.com/developer-hub/document/incremental-updates/ https://developers.foxit.com/developer-hub/document/incremen...
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

You'd think the go-to workflow for releasing redacted PDFs would be to draw black rectangles and then rasterize to image-only PDFs :shrug:

shbooms 10mo ago

often times you will have requirements that the documents you release be digitally searchable and so in these cases, this would not be an option

8note 10mo ago
run some ocr on them after to recreate the text layer?
- albert_e 10mo ago
  With the aggressive push of LLMs and Generative AI ..i am expecting a lot of OCR features to become "smarter" by default, namely go beyond mechanical OCR and start inserting hallucinations and sematically/contextually "more correct" information in OCR output It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to undo some light redactions that are deducible based on context
  - blharr 10mo ago
    Or worse, making up names or information instead of writing the reaction.
pottertheotter 10mo ago
This made me think of something I came across recently that’s almost the opposite problem of requiring PDFs to be searchable. A local government would publish PDFs where the text is clearly readable on screen, but the selectable text layer is intentionally scrambled, so copy/paste or search returns garbage. It's a very hostile thing to do, especially with public data!
- eviks 10mo ago
  Hostile indeed, and also happens in user-facing documents like product manuals!
- 2ICofafireteam 9mo ago
  I have encountered PDFs that would exhibit this behavior in one browser but not in another. One fun thing I encountered from local government is releasing files with potato quality resolution and not considering the page size. I had a FOI request that returned mainly Arch D sized drawings but they were in a 94 DPI PDF rendered as letter sized. It was a fun conversation trying to explain to an annoyed city employee that putting those large drawings in a 94 DPI letter size page effectively made it 30-ish DPI.

selinkocalar 10mo ago

As someone who's built an entire business on "anti-screenshots" this is brilliant. PDF redaction fails are everywhere and it's usually because people don't understand that covering text with a black box doesn't actually remove the underlying data. I see this constantly in compliance. People think they're protecting sensitive info but the original text is still there in the PDF structure.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Not to mention some PDF editors preserve previous edits in the PDF file itself, which people also seems unaware of. A bit more user friendly description of the feature without having to read the specification itself: https://developers.foxit.com/developer-hub/document/incremental-updates/ https://developers.foxit.com/developer-hub/document/incremen...

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]