Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 14. Redacting PDFs

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding redaction

• Using the redaction tools

• Redacting documents

This chapter covers an entirely new feature introduced in Acrobat 8 Professional only — the Redaction tools, which are used for removing data from PDF documents. In this chapter you learn about redaction, why and when it is necessary, and how to use all the new Redaction tools.

Setting Up the Work Environment

Load the Redaction and Advanced Editing tools for applying redactions to documents. You'll find Redaction tools in a separate toolbar and accessible from a context menu opened from the Toolbar Well, or select Tools

What Is Redaction?

Quite simply, redaction is the deletion of 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 onscreen where you can't see items marked for deletion on a document page, but the PDF document still contains the ...