Redact and sanitize confidential information from PDF documents

Before sharing PDF documents, it is often useful to sanitize them up or black out areas, as documents can contain confidential or personal data and to prevent inferences about the creator or editor of the document.

Redact is a function that allows visible elements in a PDF document to be marked and removed. This allows confidential text or images in a PDF document to be made invisible.
 

"Sanitize" removes invisible and additional content

With the "Redact" function, displayed text and images are marked and permanently removed from the PDF document. However, since there are also invisible elements in a PDF document, such as metadata, or additional content, such as annotations, these can also contain confidential and personal information. To remove this information as well, the "Sanitize" function should also be applied to a PDF document.

Control redactning and sanitizing individually

webPDF provides the corresponding functions for "Redact" as well as for "Sanitize". On the one hand, these functions can be executed visually very easily via the webPDF portal, on the other hand, they can be executed automatically via the web service API.

In the webPDF portal, an area in a PDF document can simply be marked and then redacted so that the content is hidden and completely removed when a PDF document is forwarded. Textual content as well as graphics can be edited with the "Redact" function.

In addition, a PDF document can be completely sanitized, i. e.

  • annotations,
  • form fields,
  • metadata,
  • tags,
  • attachments,
  • layers,
  • outlines

can be removed or entire pages with editable textual content can be flattened to a static single image. This removes content that is invisible to the reader of a PDF document and may contain personal data.