So very often we see in the movies and also on news TV channels that when they obtain some documents from the US army or FBI, the documents have certain parts “redacted”. Those parts are blackened out using a marker and then a photocopy is made of that document. This ensures that those parts are not revealed to the person seeking that information.
Now we can do the same with PDF documents using a free software called PDF Redactor. It is a small PDF editor that comes with many PDF editing tools but the main focus is on redacting information for a PDF file. After launching the PDF Redactor, you can begin by opening the PDF file.
In order to redact the text from the open PDF file, we can click on the Redact button in the toolbar. After this we can select all the text that we want to redact and then save the PDF file. We can use black or white color for redacting the text. When we use black color, we are telling others which parts were intentionally removed. When we use white color, we are hiding that we have redacted something especially if the PDF document has white background.
Other than redacting, we can also modify the PDF file by adding new text and new images. We can use white redaction to remove old text and then add new text on top of it. We can choose the text color, font size and the font face too. Similarly we can add new image in the PDF files for the same effect – for hiding older images. You can move the newly added images, changing their positions and resizing them.
The free version of the PDF Redactor has a number of limitations. For example, we cannot use it for redacting information from a PDF file that contains more that 100 pages.
You can download PDF Redactor from https://pdfredactor.com/.