Information About Redaction

Search and Pattern Matching

One of the most important parts of redaction is finding the content that needs to be redacted. This can be a time-consuming, tedious task when it involves reading every document in its entirety.

Redact-It offers a rich search engine that greatly increases the speed and accuracy with which sensitive content can be found and redacted. If you have scanned TIFF or PDF documents, Redact-It can even perform OCR (requires purchase of OCR-enabled version), making the documents text-searchable so you can take advantage of its robust search.

Redact a Text String
If you know the exact text you need to redact, like "$65 million", you can simply use the Find and Redact tool. You can also build entire lists of phrases to redact. Redact-It Desktop will even let you select text and have all occurrences of that text automatically redacted.

Redact Common Privacy Information
Need to redact email addresses, Social Security numbers or credit card numbers? Use one of Redact-It's extensive set of built-in patterns, including:

Social Security Numbers
Phone Numbers
Dates of Birth
Names, including common variations such as “John Doe”, “Doe, John”, “John A. Doe” and more
Email addresses
Money
Credit card numbers
Passport numbers
Addresses

Redact Any Pattern
Redact-It uses the industry-standard search syntax, regular expressions, to do its pattern matching. This makes it easy to write your own search expressions to cover any patterns that may be specific to your own data. You can even choose to find a pattern of text and redact only part of it. For example, you could write a pattern to redact:

ID numbers specific to your organization
All but the last four digits of a credit card or Social Security number
Redact all credit card numbers except the one in question
Formulas

Redaction patterns can be recorded into scripts for reuse. This makes it easy to write and test a pattern in Redact-It Desktop, and then use it on large batches of documents through Redact-It Enterprise. Alternately, organizations can build libraries of scripts to ensure that all their Redact-It Desktop users are redacting the same patterns. You can also save patterns as a named macro, which can then be used in any other redaction step.

Redact Between Patterns
Redact-It will allow you to specify two patterns and redact everything between them. This can speed redaction in many cases, such as:

Redacting all text between brackets
Redact fields in a form by specifying the label of the form field and the label of the next field.
Redact a multi-page section in a document by specifying the section heading and the heading of the next section.