Home / ubuntu / Questions / 32139
Accepted
Amanda
Asked: 2011-03-27 10:48:18 +0800 CST

Remove text information from a PDF?

  • 772

I printed a recent credit card statement straight to PDF and used PDFEdit to black out (highlight in black) the information I'd prefer not to share with the party I need to send this to. Now I can't seem to find a way to save the document so that the text isn't there, hiding under the black bars.

I tried to flatten it, but that hasn't resolved the issue.

I tried printing to PDF, but the text information is all preserved. I tried opening it in OOo Writer and I get an error.

Is there a method available to me (in 10.04) to save the PDF as an image, functionally?

I thought "flattening" would achieve that but I'm obviously missing something.

software-recommendation

3 Answers

  1. Openoffice

    Install the PDF Import Extension from Oracle into your Extension Manager for OpenOffice and you will be able to open and edit your PDF files inside of OpenOffice Draw. Which will create all the elements (text, lines, drawings, etc.) and you will be able to remove those that you don't wish. A screenshot is here:

    enter image description here

    Gimp

    If you prefer to handle your pdf pages as layers and edit'em as images, then you can right click the PDF file and choose "Open with GIMP Image Editor", the "Import from PDF" dialog will show after opening gimp and will allow you to choose which pages you wish to edit with several options as shown in the next screenshot.

    enter image description here

    After which you will also be able to edit those pages as shown in this screenshot:

    enter image description here

    Good luck!

    • 5

  2. pdftoppm might be useful for you. You should find it in synaptic, maybe in a package with a different name, together with other utilities. 

    apropos pdftoppm
pdftoppm (1)         - Portable Document Format (PDF) to Portable Pixmap (PPM) converter (version 3.00)

    Is thist a single page? Here are other converters:

    • pdf2dsc
    • pdf2ps
    • pdf2swf
    • pdftohtml
    • pdftoppm
    • pdftops
    • pdftosrc
    • pdftotext

    there may be more. From ps, you may transform further:

    • ps2ascii
    • ps2eps
    • ps2epsi
    • ps2pdf
    • ps2pdf12
    • ps2pdf13
    • ps2pdf14
    • ps2pdfwr
    • ps2pk
    • ps2ps
    • pstopnm
    • pstops
    • 4
  3. Best Answer

    What finally worked was opening it in GIMP, per Gepettevs D'Constanzo's suggestion and using print > print to file to print it as a PDF. So now it has no searchable, selectable text information. I decided I didn't need the second page, so this worked. Still frustrated that there's not a more transparent way to flatten a PDF (and frustrated that "flatten" isn't the right word.)

    Elsewhere on the internets, someone pointed out that inkscape is also a good way to edit PDFs. Indeed using pdftk burst and Inkscape and then pdftk cat is infinitely more efficient than PDFedit.

    • 3