Redact PDFs in Android

Redaction typically involves removing sensitive content within documents for safe distribution to courts, patent and government institutions, the media, customers, vendors or any other audience with restricted access to the content. The redaction process in Apryse consists of two steps:

• Content identification: A user applies redact annotations that specify the pieces or regions of content that should be removed. The content for redaction can be identified either interactively (e.g. using PDFViewCtrl) or programmatically (e.g. using TextSearch or TextExtractor). Up until the next step is performed, the user can see, move and redefine these annotations.

• Content removal: Using Redactor.Redact() the user instructs Apryse to apply the redact regions, after which the content in the area specified by the redact annotations is removed. The redaction function includes number of options to control the style of the redaction overlay (including color, text, font, border, transparency, etc.).

Apryse Redactor makes sure that if a portion of an image, text, or vector graphics is contained in a redaction region, that portion of the image or path data is destroyed and is not simply hidden with clipping or image masks.

Apryse API can also be used to review and remove metadata and other content that can exist in a PDF document, including XML Forms Architecture (XFA) content and Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) content.

The Tools package comes with a TextRedactionCreate tool and a RectRedactionCreate tool that allow redaction on any region or through text selection.

Text redaction	Rectangular redaction

The built-in redaction tool will continue to improve in the near future.

Keep in mind that Apryse's redact feature can do much more! See related topics here:

• Redact sample
• Redactor API reference