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The most important thing to remember about redacting documents is to
permanently remove the information from the document. Do not use a black
highlighter in Adobe Acrobat to cover up the information! Highlighter marks
can be removed by anyone with Adobe Acrobat and anyone can search the text of the
document to find the text that is beneath the highlighter mark.
If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can use the redaction features of the program to
redact documents electronically (see Redacting Using Adobe Acrobat Pro below).
Please note that Adobe Acrobat Standard does not have redaction features.
Redacting using Word
If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro, then you should edit the text of any
document that you have in the original file (e.g., a Word document) to remove the
information. Replace any characters that you remove with the letter x and then
save the edited document as a new document. Here is an example:
Original text document:
Mike Brown’s social security number is 357-57-7372. His home
address is 1510 Maple Avenue, New York, 201292. His credit
card number is 2138 2912 2938 2919.
Edited Text:
Mike Brown’s social security number is xxxxxxxxxx. His home address is
xxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx. His credit card number is xxxx
xxxx xxxx xxxx.
As you can see, depending on the font you are using, editing the document in this way
may slightly alter the layout of your document. Be sure to check the page layout to see
if your page numbering has been altered. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro and you
only have the documents in paper format, you will need to copy the documents, redact
them manually, and then scan the redacted documents. Please note that document
Redaction should be done before creating bookmarks and making the appendices text
searchable. The steps below will remove bookmarks and text recognition. See Practice
Book Section 47 for the types of information that must be redacted.
4. Redacting
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structure and searchability may be lost unless the scanner is set to automatically
scan documents in OCR (optical character recognition) format.