Hi /wsr/, I'm using some sensitive documents in my reasearch

>>210630
maybe nitro pdf + convert 1 page to jpg + add 1 page + remove text page ? usually you can find links on youtube or google if you type "nitro pdf full" i recommend the version 8 or above

>>210630
It's called "redacting" a PDF, and I strongly, strongly advise you not to invent your own way of doing it.

Your employer should pay for a proper redactor for you, as they're vicariously liable for the data you leak when you fuck it up.

>>210634
I'm just an uni student from a shit country though and we're not getting showered with money to get things done professionally. The research funding is a joke here.

>>210633
mean nitro pro not pdf**

>>210636
I strongly advise you to put your concerns to your supervisor in writing.

If you just need to submit PDFs for some bureaucratic reason, then redact them like you did, print them all out somewhere secure, then scan them to PDF.

Yeah, I concur with the advice so far. Shittily pasting a censor bar across after the fact will not do. The original text is still there in the file.

That's on par with past government fuck-ups where they "censored" data by marking black text with black background in Word and exporting as PDF. Sure, if you print it, it looks fine, but if you have the pdf you just mark the text and it'll show up or you just copy, paste and look at it.

If you want to keep it hypertext you can't censor by simply adding, you need to take away the original data first.

Ask around. Any self-respecting university has to have some licenses of Adobe Acrobat Pro. That lets you edit PDFs on the fly so you can take away the old text and replace it with black bars while keeping the rest intact.
Since Adobe only rents out software these days (Creative Cloud) you could also buy a month or two of Acrobat Pro DC.

(Disclaimer: I can't guarantee Acrobat Pro will do the job since it depends on your input PDFs. Try before you buy or ask around to make sure.)

So your PDF just consists of scanned images, right? Use pdfimages (part of poppler-utils) to extract them, then use an image editor of your choice. If you get a billion small chunks of each page (e.g. foreground text layers and a background layer), use pdftocairo instead.

If you have used the TIFF format, you can use tiffcp and tiff2pdf (both come with libtiff) to create a PDF, but I recommend using something like pdfbeads or ImageMagick’s convert utility instead.

Those are all Lunix nerd tools, but they should be available for Windows as well.

If you don’t have scanned images but actual vector graphics and text in that PDF then Inkscape should let you edit those. Simply remove the stuff underneath the bars.

>>210908
This is what you need to do to redact a PDF: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/removing-sensitive-content-pdfs.html

Think you can do all that? In Inkscape? The Inkscape that has a famous support thread about it having no discoverable way to draw a line?

Unless you're using an actual tested PDF redactor, the only way to guarantee you've not fucked something up is to print them and scan them.

>>210914
Sure I can do all that. I understand the PDF format well enough. It’s not black magic (except for those few evil PDFs that contain Flash and video content).

If the PDF consists of scanned images, it may include a hidden text layer (often OCR’d), but pdfimages and pdftocairo will simply discard that (as they only write image files with no metadata).
In the text/vector graphics case, if there are any hidden objects, they will show up in Inkscape’s XML editor, but it shouldn’t import most of them to begin with. If anything, it’s more likely to fuck up your fonts and screw you over with its lack of multi page support. Because Inkscape.

I merely suggested some free tools. Of course you should pick something else if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you just don’t want to use a bunch of command line crap. The Adobe software *is* much easier to use, after all.