Edit personal details in e-mails

[basbeek]

Dear people,

I am struggling with the following problem. In a batch of 100's of documents, I want to be able to find and edit (hide) personal details (names/surnames) at once. I use the 'search' button with 'all opened documents'.

Take the following example. When I search my name in this document it highlights my personal details. I want to redact those results all at once, but not in the way PDFXchange does it. I want the software to redact the full rectangle, not the individual words. Is there any way doing this in 100's of documents at once with the search option? Doing this manually costs me too much time...

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Hi basbeek.

You can try to use Find&Redact feature in our PDF-Tools application. It may process your 100's files 'at one click only'.

Cheers.

[basbeek]

Hi basbeek.

You can try to use Find&Redact feature in our PDF-Tools application. It may process your 100's files 'at one click only'.

Cheers.

Hi Vasyl,

Thanks for answering. However, this doesn't solve the problem. The find& redact tool in PDFXchange & PDFTools both only highlights the individual words when searching for a name and doesn't include the spaces in between. See this screen capture I recorded. The search tool now perfectly searches and finds names, but both the search tool and find & redact don't highlights and annotate the WHOLE name. I now have to do this manually, which doesn't make sense to me.

See video on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmTUPKL7KGk

[Willy Van Nuffel]

Hi all,

It seems like the option "Naar rechthoek wijzigen" / "Transform to rectangle" is missing in PDF-Tools - "Find and Redact".

@Tracker Support : Something to consider ?

Thanks and best regards.

[basbeek]

Hi all,

It seems like the option "Naar rechthoek wijzigen" / "Transform to rectangle" is missing in PDF-Tools - "Find and Redact".

@Tracker Support : Something to consider ?

Thanks and best regards.

Hello Willy,

Would also be nice to include this option in PDFXchange itself, since scrolling through names in several documents at the same time is easier in PDFXchange. Doing it manually is a lot of work!

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Hi

You also may try this way:

image.png (26.91 KiB) Viewed 1107 times

The text enclosed by quote marks is treated by Search feature as exact text that should be found on pages. It is not ideal way because is sensitive to spaces/separators between words and order of words, but it might work for your case when all your documents has identical texts that should be removed...

HTH

[Willy Van Nuffel]

Thanks to Vasyl for the idea.

The "Search"-feature with Options... > Annotate Search Results > Redact Search Results is indeed the best way to select all the text to be marked for redaction, in multiple PDF's, in one run, in PDF-XChange Editor.

However, the question is still there: How to transform (in one click) all the different selections of "Bas" "van" "de" "Beek" to single blocks, before applying redaction ?

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

You may try the following java script:

Code: Select all

var pagesNum = this.numPages;
for (var i = 0; i < pagesNum; i++)
{
	var al = this.getAnnots(i);
	if (al == null)
		continue;
	for (var j = 0; j < al.length; j++)	
	{
		var a = al[j];	
		if (a.type != "Redact")
			continue;
		var r = a.rect;
		var q = [[[r[0], r[3]], [r[2], r[3]], [r[0], r[1]], [r[2], r[1]]]];
		a.quads = q;
	}
}

Run this script in the Editor's JS-console (Ctrl+J to show the console).

HTH

[basbeek]

You may try the following java script:

Code: Select all

var pagesNum = this.numPages;
for (var i = 0; i < pagesNum; i++)
{
	var al = this.getAnnots(i);
	if (al == null)
		continue;
	for (var j = 0; j < al.length; j++)	
	{
		var a = al[j];	
		if (a.type != "Redact")
			continue;
		var r = a.rect;
		var q = [[[r[0], r[3]], [r[2], r[3]], [r[0], r[1]], [r[2], r[1]]]];
		a.quads = q;
	}
}

Run this script in the Editor's JS-console (Ctrl+J to show the console).

HTH

Hi Vasyl,

Thanks! This script works when I open an individual document, but is there also an option to apply this script to 100's of documents at the same time? That would help me a lot at the moment!

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

There is a script that processing all opened documents:

Code: Select all

var docs = app.activeDocs;
for (var d = 0; d < docs.length; d++)
{
	var doc = docs[d];
	var pagesNum = doc.numPages;
	for (var i = 0; i < pagesNum; i++)
	{
		var al = doc.getAnnots(i);
		if (al == null)
			continue;
		for (var j = 0; j < al.length; j++)	
		{
			var a = al[j];	
			if (a.type != "Redact")
				continue;
			var r = a.rect;
			var q = [[[r[0], r[3]], [r[2], r[3]], [r[0], r[1]], [r[2], r[1]]]];
			a.quads = q;
		}
	}
}

Sure and unfortunately - you need to open that docs to process and if you open all you 100's docs - it may overuse your system resources. So practical way might be:
1. open couple tens of docs
2. process them by JS
3. save and close them
4. open another couple tens of docs ...

[basbeek]

Thanks to Vasyl for the idea.

The "Search"-feature with Options... > Annotate Search Results > Redact Search Results is indeed the best way to select all the text to be marked for redaction, in multiple PDF's, in one run, in PDF-XChange Editor.

However, the question is still there: How to transform (in one click) all the different selections of "Bas" "van" "de" "Beek" to single blocks, before applying redaction ?

Hi Vasyl,

Additional question: is there also a possibility with the 'search function' to delete all the redacted search results for a certain word? For example: if I redacted all the 'Bas van de Beek' in the text, can I also undo that with one click?

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi, basbeek

Unfortunately no, As a comment, once the redaction is placed, it actually has no association to the text below it and does not know what it is covering. As such, you cannot dynamically "undo" redaction, you would need to manually find each instance and remove it.

Kind regards,