Hacker News Reader

Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

To explain what this is: The EU mistakenly uploaded a censored version of the contract earlier today where some blacked out parts could be reconstructed using PDF metadata.

This version has those included in red.

View on HN

Not sure if it was the EU or AZ that did the (failed) redaction. (Yes, despite the fact that it was published on an EU website)

Anyway it seems that orgs keep falling for the "PDF redaction" caveats

To be fair, I've grown paranoid about PDF metadata and redactions, so I prefer taking screenshots and making a new PDF out of those as long as the document is only a few pages in length, or using imagemagick or similar to flatten it. I haven't found an easier way to be absolutely sure that my annotations are permanent, and this metadata issue is perhaps even trickier.

Print, review, and scan is probably easier than screenshotting, if you have the equipment.

That this is the state of things is pretty amazing

PDF is a shitty format.

As proof, I offer: can't grep on it.

Which, BTW, if it was possible, would have prevented this mess.

Linux has a pdfgrep command which works pretty well (unless the PDF has images of text).

Unless the PDF has every letter placed by independent PostScript like commands or - worse - text has been imported from an SVG file.

pdfgrep is at best probabilistic and I stand by my comment..

Agreed. I work on a solution for extracting data from random documents ( invoices, payslips, you name it ) for natives pdf in the wild ( not scans) we gave up : and just rasterize to send to an OCR software... It's also probabilistic, but way more reliable.

Spotlight can also search within PDFs

And yet it is the format documents are in. Government websites are full of PDFs.

If you have a scanner, the easiest way is to take the redacted version provided by your attorneys, print it, then scan it through a document feeder to PDF. Nobody's reconstructing anything from that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com