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May I add...Rasterise your documents after redaction if using digital tools to manually redact.

I have seen many a doc with history still included because they were using illustrator or something similar

Respect. I do one layer more — black box, print out, then scan.

I’ve seen even this fail once, although it was unusual circumstances. Black box on what turned out to be slightly off-black text using a PDF highlighting tool. Not the ideal way to do it. When printed and scanned you could just barely read it if you had a monitor with a bad viewing angle or adjusted the contrast. A paralegal caught it before it went out.

Black boxes also fail when they leave out the bottom or top of characters.

I took down a ton of poorly redacted black boxes while modding /r/facepalm

In retrospect, a bot could do the job pretty well

Caught by pair a eagle eyes, eh?

You can also screenshot as an interim step, though not quite as secure as this. :-)

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