We have Adobe Acrobat Standard software for our basic PDF editing tasks. It works great. But occasionally, we need to redact documents for other parties and only the Pro version has the feature built-in.
But Adobe Acrobat Pro isn’t cheap. It’s quite expensive actually. Since we don’t do redaction often, it really doesn’t justify the cost.
So, what I ended up doing is to come up with a workaround that is simple enough for people to redact the document without compromising the result.
First off, draw a rectangle box over the content you want to redact. Make sure to set the properties of the box with black-filled color and mark it as default.
Repeat the same step until you are done with all the redactions to the document.
Then, to finalize the redactions you just did, you will need to flatten all the black-filled boxes into the document so no covered content can be reviewed by anyone else.
To do so, Print the document to Adobe PDF printer. But before you hit the Print button, click the Advanced button and check the option Print as Image. And then click OK and Print.
And that’s it. Note that, since we reprinted the file in image format, the size of the file will be bigger than the original. You may also OCR the document and/or save a reduced version if needed.
Folks who use this method should be aware that it does NOT redact content. It simply conceals it. The content can be easily accessed, and is not protected in any way. if you’re redacting for legal reasons, releasing a file ‘redacted’ in this way may leave you open to liability.
This method works great if you’re going to provide **printed copies** of the document, though!
Thanks so much for this work around. One thing to note. The Print As Image maybe grayed out if you do not uncheck Print in grayscale on the main page.