Redacting in Word then Converting to PDF

02/10/2006 at 14:02

If you redacted a document in Word (by blacking out the text with the highlight tool), converted it to PDF using PDF Writer (v5), if you were to convert the pdf back to a rich text file would the redactions be reversible?

Thanks

Jamie @ www.trekkingbritain.com

02/10/2006 at 14:42

Dave... are you bored or something?

Dave O aka Jungle Dave ;)

02/10/2006 at 14:55

No its something I have to do for work and my boss wants to know the answer!

Jamie @ www.trekkingbritain.com

02/10/2006 at 15:09

Am trying it for you, will report back soon. Just created a Word doc and highlighted a word out of it in black highlight and getting someone else to write the PDF. Once I've done that I'll do last bit...

Dave O aka Jungle Dave ;)

02/10/2006 at 15:12

Thanks

Jamie @ www.trekkingbritain.com

02/10/2006 at 15:27

Hi Dave,

I created a Word Document using Microsoft Word 2000, in it I wrote a sentence and highlighted the word 'test' in black so it couldn't be seen. I then used Adobe Acrobat Writer 5 to create a document of the same name, in Adobe Acrobat reader you cannot see the text that is highlighted out in black, even when you use the text tool to scroll over it, if you know what I mean.

However when in Acrobat Reader 7 I go to File > Save As Text and then look at the basic text file it has created, I can actually see the highlighted word unfortunately.

Hope that helps, ofcourse it could well be something they may have changed for newer versions. I am an IT Engineer and currently sat on one of my clients sites, but as you can see from the Word version they are still using older versions of a lot of there software.

Best I can do though in circumstances, hope it helps!

Dave O aka Jungle Dave ;)

02/10/2006 at 15:42

thats very useful, to know thanks

tdave@walkeryri.org.uk

02/10/2006 at 18:57

Try "print to PDF", that might render it as an image... then again, it might not. Worth a try. But do you want the document to be at all editable though? I'm assuming not if sections are blacked out, and the above might just work...

Edit
Curiosity got better of me, and no, it does not work :-((

Edited: 02/10/2006 at 19:00

tdave@walkeryri.org.uk

02/10/2006 at 19:02

Ok, print to PDF, open in Acrobat, save as a graphic file and then convert the graphic file to PDF.

A pain, but it works. You'll need to fiddle with resolutions or file types i think to ensure the exported graphic file is of high quality.

PhilW

02/10/2006 at 22:45

MS do have a proper redaction tool addin (Google for it). I haven't tried it but suspect it will work properly without messing around with black highlighting etc.