Why Are the Lines Blacked Out in My Adobe Reader Files?
Adobe's creation of the Portable Document Format (PDF) file in 1993 revolutionized the way people distribute documents. This format allows people to share all types of documents without having the program that originally created the document. Anyone can view these PDFs in Adobe's free Adobe Reader program. However, sometimes in certain industries, such as law and government, these documents contain sensitive information that will be blacked out.
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Redaction
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Redaction is the process of removing information from a document. Beginning with Adobe Acrobat 8, Acrobat has included redaction tools that replace the designated information with black lines.
Reasons for Redaction
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PDF documents sometimes include sensitive information such as full names, Social Security numbers and banking information for one party to use, and then the information in the PDF is forwarded onto another entity. The forwarded entity, however, should not have access to this information. In addition, redacting allows the user to remove copyrighted information that should not be redistributed.
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Real-World Applications
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Lawyers and government officials are the primary users of the redaction tool in Adobe Acrobat. They receive documents that contain sensitive information on a daily basis. Oftentimes a document will contain a copyrighted logo or content that would be illegal to redistribute.
Prior to PDF
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Redaction is not new to the electronic era. Prior to PDF files, the person redacting the information printed a hard copy of the document and used a black marker to block the content.
Highlighting
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Prior to Adobe Acrobat 8, some people mistakenly used the highlighting feature in Acrobat's commenting feature. The highlighting feature also displays as a black line in Adobe Reader; however, the information is not removed and can be recovered using Adobe Acrobat.
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