Choose an appropriate folder and name your redacted and flattened PDF. Hit PRINT and a File Save box will appear. !!!!CHOOSE ADVANCED PRINT SETUP > PRINT AS IMAGE !!!! Otherwise, Adobe keeps the OCR text in tact and the “hidden” text below a black bar box can be highlighted & copied. Also, change Comments and Forms dropdown to select “Document and Markups”. This allows us to change the line Color and Fill Color to BLACK.ĭo NOT SAVE or SAVE AS!! It is very important to FILE > PRINT as this flattens the PDF file, removing meta data and comment layers.Ĭhoose “Microsoft Print to PDF” as the printer. Right click the Rectangle tool and choose “Tool Default Properties”. Open the Comment tab and find the Rectangle tool in Drawing Markups. I am using version X, but the process is the same for XI, XII, and DC. To begin, open your PDF file in Acrobat Standard. The trick is to use the built in comment tools and then flatten the PDF to remove layer comments. Here is how we can effectively do the same with the Standard version of Acrobat. We can work around that by re-saving the redacted file as a “Flat PDF” using the built in Microsoft Print to PDF.Īdobe advertises Acrobat Pro as being the only solution to redact documents. However, this normally leaves meta data that can be used to simply remove the drawing / comment markup box.

We can use the shape tool to redact lines in Adobe Acrobat Standard.

Adobe acrobat 2017 standard