Redacting your Deepest Secrets (updated)
(I updated a few sections in italic to fix the overprinting issue observed in the comments)
What is Redaction?
Redaction is a powerful tool used to remove sensitive information like Social Security numbers, date of birth, phone numbers, or anything that you want to prevent someone else from viewing. For me I have always associated redaction with the release of CIA reports and other nefarious government agencies.
Adobe Acrobat Professional has had fantastic redaction capabilities for some time now, but this always had to be done after exporting from InDesign. The following technique may not be the most efficient way to redact, but it is an interesting experiment.
Redacting Areas of the Page
If you would like to apply redaction to specific areas of a page, the easiest method is to create a frame, fill it with black, apply overprint fill, 99.9% opacity with multiply turned on. This can easily be saved as an object style to quickly application to any area of the page that you would like to censor. In order to prevent the text from being seen, you will need to create a character style with the text fill and stroke set to “none”.
Redacting Specific Text
If you only have a few areas to redact this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but what if you need to redact multiple instances of a word?
My first step was to create an anchored object based on the black redaction object style I made earlier. The difference is that I made this rectangle the exact width of the word that I am trying to redact, in my case “UFO”. When I was creating the anchored object, I had to be sure to change the anchored object options to change the X relative to the Anchor Marker.
Applying the Redaction globally.
First off, I have to copy the anchored object to the clipboard. Next, run Find/Change and put in the Find what field: UFO; inside Change to: ^cUFO (^c is contents of the clipboard formatted). This will find every instance of UFO in my document and place the redaction anchored object directly on top of it.
Grep Styles to the Rescue
In order to prevent the text from showing up inside Acrobat or another PDF editor, it is important to change the text to none. If you only had a few words that you need to change, you could manually apply a character style that changed the fill and stroke to none. Any easy way to get rid of all of the instances of a common word like UFO is to make a Grep style that applies the redaction character style to all instances of that word.
Final Prep
1. Do a select all and convert to outlines. This will prevent the text from being searched or selectable underneath the black bars.
2. Export as and Acrobat 4 file to flatten the transparency
3. Password protect your file. In the PDF export options, be sure to pdf a password on your file to prevent editing. This will stop people from moving the redaction boxes and seeing what secrets are underneath. This will also prevent them from exporting the images from the pdf sans redaction.
Testing
To test how powerful this redaction really is, I encourage people to download the *PDF (updated)* in this post and see if you can find out what the name of the alien baby and the planet it is from. If no one can discover out the names, this might be a viable option for some people.
The baby’s name is “Gordon Shumway” from the planet “Melmac.” Simply open the PDF in Preview.app (or Acrobat) and you’ll see ever so slight ghosting around the outlined letters… To really make it obvious, open in Acrobat, go to Output Preview, select Preview > Color Warnings and enable ‘Show Overprinting’.
I opened the PDF and went to the output settings and clicked Colour Warnings>Show Overprinting
And the name comes up in the colour of my liking :)
Nice try though.
I wonder if it would better if you made a redact character style and changed the text to white, or use a grep style to change the colour of the word. Then apply the black box over the white text.
Or even set the colour of the text to none.
Or use a paragraph above or below to cover the text (can’t remember which one goes over the text – probably the above).
So a character style colour of none, a paragraph rule above to cover the text and then a coloured graphic frame over the text.
Not at my computer right now – so can’t test it.
And then Michael Moore founds the password and reveals that it’s again Bush’s fault…
Thanks Eugene for the tip on hanging the text color. I changed it to none and it seems to have fixed the issue.
I have updated the name of the alien baby, lets see if anyone can find it this time.
On a side note, Gordon Shumway was the name of A.L.F. from the American TV show ALF. ALF stood for Alien Life Form.
After having removed the password (gotta love that false sense of security Adobe gives) and opening the PDF in my PDF editor, it appeared all lines of text, except the headline have become outlines, and behind the black bars there’s nothing to be found.
Excellent, it looks like this may actually work then!
Although, if it is who your time is another question.
Congrats. You’ve successfully redacted the text. FWIW, it doesn’t appear that password protection was even necessary…
P.S., the link text “(Updated)” is invalid, pointing to “https://” but the tooltip is showing the complete/accurate URL.
Make ‘Strike through’, thick line, offset. Make characterstyle for this striketrough. Now Search text and apply this characterstyle.
Isse easzy eh! ;-)
Good stuff Fritz – it’s a lot better now.
I basically do what Fvd Geest does. Character style of a strikethrough or a custom underscore with the appropriate offsets; and the type itself set to none.
@Fvd Geest, that really is an elegant solution. I guess I just over thought this one.
Problem with that Fritz is that even when you make the pdf the text is still selectable.
With the black graphic frame over the text is great too. But the text is still selectable.
In my tests applying a Multiply to the black object and then flattening the PDF the text is completely gone from the pdf and all that’s left is a black rectangle.
Even with Multiply selected for the strikethrough the text is still selectable in the PDF.
The only true way – as far as I can see is to make the text colour to None so that no matter what there is no text to physically see. And to put a frame over the text that rasterises the text so there is nothing selectable.
Looking forward to other ways or flaws in my way too :)
I would choose a similar approach as Fvd Geest, that is using a character style with strikethru/underline turned on and InDesign search capabilities.
However, you can avoid the critical text to become part of the pdf document by setting its color to “None” and the strikethru tone to any spot color you like.
When exporting/printing disallow color conversion.
You do not even have to protect the pdf file, although you may choose to do so if you feel more comfortable.
No ghost lines in the pdf, no revelation when switching on “show overprinting” in Acrobat.
If you try to copy the text below the strikethru line (in your example the black bar) it won’t work. If you try to copy it as part of a larger text string you won’t be successful either. Needless to say, that the text won’t appear in text exports. It simply isn’t part of the pdf file.