Redacting PDF documents

Redaction in this context means removing text from the original document, usually before forwarding the document to other parties. For example, you might need to remove sensitive, personal, private, or classified information not intended by policy or legislation to be distributed publicly. In the final PDF document, redacted text is covered by black bars and cannot be reinserted into the document or made readable again.

About text redaction

Typically, redacting a document consists of 3 main steps:

• Mark text for redaction
• Review the marked text
• Apply marked redactions (that is, actually redact the document)

Mark text for redaction

First, you find and select text chunks to redact, marking them for redaction, but not actually redacting the document. You can search for text to redact in four different ways:

• Manually mark sections of text.
• Use the AI-suggested redaction. This will search the PDF document for AI-based language models provided by KMDtxt and trained through machine learning to recognize sensitive and personally identifiable information. Currently, AI suggestions can recognize identifiers of: people, locations (addresses and placenames), organizations, CPR numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, and passport numbers. A full list of entities that are supported by AI-suggested redaction is available for system administrators in WorkZone Configurator( under PDF > Entities for AI redaction). See Entities for AI redaction.
• Search by specific text (that is, use free text search). Search results will be automatically marked for redaction.
• Use the redaction search rules. This will search the PDF document for a set of recurring patterns defined in the search rule. For example, a pattern that identifies the text as an email address. All text that matches the applied search rule will be marked for redaction. By default, there are four search rules: Email address, Web address, CPR number, and CVR number. System administrators can create additional search rules for your organization in WorkZone Configurator.

When you mark text for redaction, the PDF document is not redacted yet. The redaction markings can be removed by you or other users. Once you have found and marked all the text that you want to redact, you can either apply the redaction to the marked text, or exit the Advanced PDF pane to cancel the redaction.

Mark text for redaction

1. Open the PDF document that you want to redact in the preview pane.
2. In the preview pane, select the Advanced PDF pane. If the Advanced PDF pane is not available, it must be added to the preview pane by an administrator.
3. Mark the needed text for redaction.
•  To manually mark text for redaction:
  1. In the Advanced PDF pane toolbar, select Redact and click Select (Esc) to enable the selection tool.
  2. In the PDF document, manually select the text you want to mark for redaction and then select Mark for redaction in the text toolbar.
     
• To search for text to redact:
  1. In the Advanced PDF pane, click Panel to open the left panel and click Redaction to open the Redaction pane.
  2. In the Redaction pane, search for the text to redact in one of the following methods:
     • AI suggestions: Under Search using AI, select one or more of the available entities, and click View suggestions.
     • Free text search: Under Search by text, enter the exact text that you want redacted, and click Search.

       Note: The text search in the Redactionpane is not case-sensitive.

     • Redaction search rules: Under Search by rules, select the search rule that you want to apply and click Search.
4. To get an overview of the suggested redactions, click Search to open the Search pane and display search results.

Document review and multiple redactions

Until you apply redaction, at any point you can send the document to other users who can continue redacting the document or review the text you have marked for redaction. A PDF document can contain multiple redactions and multiple users can redact the same document, but not at the same time. When a PDF document is edited, it is locked in WorkZone Explorer to prevent users from making simultaneous changes. The document lock will be reset after 15 minutes of document inactivity.

Users, including reviewers, can remove any redaction markings in the PDF document, until the final redaction has been applied, but once the text has been redacted, it cannot be restored.

You can see all current redaction markings at the bottom of the Redaction pane, ordered by search results.

View text marked for redaction

Text that is marked for redaction is displayed with a red outline in the PDF document but you can also see a list of all text marked for redaction by search result or from manual selection.

1. In the Advanced PDF pane, click Panel > Redaction to display a list of all different types of text marked for redaction under the search fields.
   If you have performed multiple searches, the results of each search are displayed along with the search text.
2. Click to remove redaction marking from all text that originates from that specific search.
   If you remove the MANUAL_REDACTIONS entry, all redaction markings that were added manually will be removed.
3. Click Save to save your changes or click Cancel to cancel all changes and close the pane.

You can also perform a normal search for the redacted text, but this search may not correspond to the redaction search because the normal search can be made case-sensitive and/or limited to the whole word only.

Remove redaction markings from a text

You can remove redaction markings in multiple ways:

Apply redactions

Once you have marked and reviewed all text that you want to redact, you can apply redactions to the marked text.

1. In the Advanced PDF pane, click Panel > Redaction.
2. Click Apply Redactions to redact all text marked for redaction in the document.
3. In the Confirm dialog, click Apply.
   • Select the Remove all annotations option, if you want to remove from the document all non-redaction annotations (such as comments, and so on) and only apply the redactions.

   Note:

   Only annotations that have an author can be removed in such way.

4. Click Save to save your changes or click Cancel to cancel all changes and close the pane.

See Also

PDF document editing

Annotating PDF documents

Editing PDF documents

Customize the preview pane

Draft versioning