Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

can you please advise if the system has a function to redact words within a document. Note from internet that Microsoft Word 2003 has this but I only use office.org

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

Sorry, there's no support for that built-in to OpenOffice.

How completely do you need to redact the document?

You can easily select the words and apply a black background--that will obscure the words in a printout but NOT in a pdf.

If you need to redact the electronic texts, you could use a search & replace, or maybe just paste/replace the characters with black squares. Maybe a small macro would be needed to make it more convenient.

Joe, Many thanks for prompt reply. Friends from Philippines coming to UK for visit in July and UK embassy there requires from me copies of driving licence, passport and bank statement. The former I have scanned and "painted "copy across each one which does not look very professional but will still show, but the bank stament I feel is none of their business what is incoming and outgoing on my account. They wish to know I can support my friends when in UK and I feel if I let them have the statement I should redact all incoming and outgoing lines and show a balance with the dates. I actually travelled to visit that country in October last year....on a UK passport only and no problem. Have called Philippine Embassy in London and they cannot even understand why UK Manila need all this nonsense just for a holiday visa. I painted out some of the items but it is a messy and a time consuming process, I have checked in town and can find no stamp which will do this job for me .I checked internet and it advises that painting even in black will allow recovery of the item on statement so I am at a loss what to do. I am also well past my "sell by date" and not very competent on this dratted machine. Thank you again for your reply, much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Iain

So these are paper documents that you've scanned into the computer, and you want to send copies attached to an OO document? Is that the situation?

If so, the best way to manage it is to use some image editing software (photoshop, MS paint, etc.) to replace the image data with black boxes. Once that's done, you can insert the redacted image into your OO document and it should be safe from snooping.

I would never leave any words, characters or images I wanted redacted in any electronic document in case they could be revealed by reverse engineering.

In the case of AOO, it could be revealed by unzipping the odt file and looking at html and/or Pictures files. so, if you want it redacted, make sure it is completely removed. Don't cover an image with another - actually replace the bits of the image you don't want before you pull the image into AOO.

Recall a few years ago the US government? was acutely embarrassed when it released some MS Word documents (or perhaps pdfs?) with redacted black rectangles. It took journalists only a few seconds to remove the black rectangles and reveal the underlying text.