Free Redaction Software

[sanantone]

Is there a free program or website where one can redact information in PDFs? I've only found places that have free trials and require credit card information.

[mysonx3]

I haven't had much luck finding free software to do much of ANYTHING with PDFs, to be honest. It's been quite frustrating for me.

[jsd]

LibreOffice Draw (which you'll need to download the whole LibreOffice Suite to get) does a good job of editing existing PDFs in general. I imagine it would work well for redacting information, though I don't have any experience with redaction software.

It is free and open source and you'll find it for any major OS.

[sanantone]

I haven't had much luck finding free software to do much of ANYTHING with PDFs, to be honest. It's been quite frustrating for me.

Adobe charges too much for extra stuff. It's like...I don't need it that bad. 

LibreOffice Draw (which you'll need to download the whole LibreOffice Suite to get) does a good job of editing existing PDFs in general. I imagine it would work well for redacting information, though I don't have any experience with redaction software.

It is free and open source and you'll find it for any major OS.

Thanks. I'll try that out.

[dfrecore]

I had to send someone some info recently, and I printed it out, used white out tape on the stuff I didn't want them to see, and then scanned it into my computer and sent it to them! OMG, it felt like 1997!!!

[Merlin]

I'd use the redaction feature in Adobe Acrobat. Since you don't have a copy, you may not realize that you can get the whole Adobe suite for $19.99/mo using the Adobe Creative Cloud student discount. That includes Adobe Acrobat Pro. For $20/mo, its a pretty decent deal. I think it only lasts a year (or maybe only a year after graduation) but either way, it's worthwhile if you use Adobe products at all, which I do. After the year it goes up to $29.99/mo, which is still a pretty good deal.

If I had to do it for free, I'd check out the free PDF editors (or ones with a free trial) to see if any of those support native redaction. There has to be one that can be used without a CC.

Failing that, I'd load the PDF into my graphics editor (there are plenty of free options here) do the redaction, and then save (or print) the file out as a new PDF. If your graphics editor doesn't natively handle PDF, then you can always view it on your screen and do a region/screen capture to an image file and then go back to the editor to do the redaction.

[sanantone]

I use Adobe all the time for reading and filling out documents, but those are free functions. Since I'm not creating PDFs from scratch, Adobe doesn't offer anything I think is worth $20 per month. But, thanks for sharing info about the student discount.

I've previously turned documents into picture files and covered up personal info in paint, but I tried LibreOffice, and it's allowing me to delete text. This is much faster and cleaner looking. I think I might post my COSC and EC evals since I can now redact quickly.

Thanks for the tip, JSD.

[jsd]

glad it worked out for you!

i knew it had some of those capabilities, but I've never had to use those features all that much so I wasn't sure if it would be enough of a fit.

[eriehiker]

I use dochub within google docs to edit pdf files.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai...j?hl=en-US