PDF Redactor

Pdf Redactor is a desktop application for safely and securely redacting sensitive information from PDF documents. The problem with other PDF editing tooling is you’re just covering up the data with additional elements but the data still exists in the source of the pdf document and can be retrieved by anyone who knows how. The other alternative is to turn it into an image, and then use Optical Character Recognition to convert it back into a PDF. This leaves a lot of space for errors when converting it back. The safest alternative is to edit the PDF source code directly.

Unfortunately the PDF file format is proprietary so editing it directly is quite a challenge because the only tooling that exists are rogue reverse engineered solution. To build this app I had to alter several open source solutions to make it behave the way I wanted it too.

The app supports manual redaction and regex patterns to suggest areas that may be sensitive and should be removed.