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I was thinking something similar. I wonder if the font uses kerning, and you know the rendering engine and the algorithm for how the text was blocked, if you can get exact text back even. Or, at a minimum, rule out words based on the available information. Not a field I am familiar with but I bet there are a lot of ways to uncover the redacted values.

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I don't know what fonts are typically used in redacted documents, but surely this kind of technique could be rendered useless by a mono space font?

Seems silly not to use a mono space font in these cases.

Wouldn’t a mono space font provide more information since you can extrapolate the exact number of characters?

My guess is that is actually less information than you get from a variable width font.

Either way, fixed or with index lines.

This is the government. The documents are faxed/photo-copied/etc etc. They are a bunch of random docs from random sources and the original creators never thought 'This will be redacted'. They just fired up word and started typing.

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