Chapter 13. Redacting PDFs
A marvelous feature introduced in Acrobat 8 was the Redaction tools, which are used for removing data from PDF documents. In Acrobat 9, Adobe expanded the tools to provide you with more sophisticated options for searching and redacting content in PDF files.
The Redaction tools appear in Acrobat Pro on both the Mac and Windows. You won't find Redaction features in Acrobat Standard on Windows.
In this chapter you learn about redaction, why and when it is necessary, the new Acrobat X features, and how to use all the Redaction tools.
Understanding Redaction
Quite simply, redaction is the removal of visual information from a document. You might want to use redaction to remove sensitive information for security purposes, to protect rights and privacy information, to eliminate classified information, to delete names of minors in legal documents, or to delete any other information you don't want viewed by others.
Redaction is much different than blotting out or hiding text, graphics, handwriting, or any other kind of marks. If you use tools like some of the comment tools to create markups that blot out some text and graphics in a document, the items are not permanently deleted. It appears fine on-screen where you can't see items marked for deletion on a document page, but the PDF document still contains the original items. If the file is distributed, other users can access marked text ...
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