I found something to like about Okular, which usually I've considered
too basic or clumsy for things I want to do with PDF documents. When
preparing some medical documents to be sent through email, so that any
sensitive info such as birth date is totally removed, I found that there
are a lot of important nuances involved when redacting digital
documents. I wanted to find an easy way to eliminate info from
documents, for a large number of pages, that would be certain to
obliterate any trace of the data.
GIMP is too time-consuming for this, in that each page of a multi-page
PDF must be edited separately and then the pages re-combined into one
document (AFAIK).
I considered downloading yet another PDF application (to Linux Mint),
but ran into too many issues with malware, ads, and data being uploaded
by the publisher. I didn't want to buy a full-featured app for just this
one purpose. There are a lot of requirements to consider: vector vs.
rastor content, converting file types (if choosing to edit a document as
a graphic) and image quality loss, and in many cases marking over
information or using an "eraser" feature only makes it invisible to a
viewer while the info continues to be available by copy-paste.
Finally I ran into this:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/72920/is-there-a-better-way-to-redact-a-pdf
This makes short work of redacting PDF documents and the original data
is totally removed:
(1) open the document in Okular
(2) press [F6] (brings up the "Review" feature that includes a highlight
option)
(3) press [3] (turns on "Freehand Line" option)
(4) scribble over the sensitive info (works whether it is text or an image)
(5) repeat 3-4 for any other sensitive info in the document
(6) [Ctrl+P] (make sure that "Print to file (PDF)" is selected
(7) Options -> PDF Options -> "Force rasterization" check box -> Print
This does tend to increase the file size quite a bit. I noticed that a
223.7 kB document had been 5.1 kB before editing. If there's a method
that merely removes the sensitive data with no other changes, I didn't
find it in a couple hours of researching.
<:Brian:>
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