effective way of blanking out text for photocopying

[Sandi]

[to legal & diy newsgroups]

I'm looking for some advice please.

I have a few hundred pages to photocopy and I need to anonymise the text by blanking out names. I thought I would do it like this:

(1) photocopy the document (2) use a black marker pen on chosen parts of text (3) photocopy the marked page

Unfortunately, unless the marker ink is the same type of "black" and is very opaque then the photocopy can sometimes pick up slivers of lines which formed letters in the original text. This could depend on which copier is used and if it needs a service. So it's not really good enough.

One idea I had was to use a narrow black tape maybe 5 or 6 mm wide over the text.

If I needed to get such tape then where could I get it? Ideally it would be easy to tear so I could work through these documents quickly. Maybe a paper tape rather than vinyl plastic.

Are there other effective but quick ways you have come across?

[Joe Lee]

I would either scan the pages using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program & save them to a drive/disc, or pay a printshop to do it if that was more cost effective.Then delete or substitute the text (using your PC) to anonymise it & then print out the modified pages or go back to the printshop & pay them to do it for you.

[Pedt]

In message , at 04:15:07 on Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Sandi wibbled

If you don't mind it appearing blank rather than blacked out[1] then use a correction roller (aka eraser mouse) e.g. like those at

I work we use them on a couple of hundred documents a week.

[1]And if you do want to show it black to say you've redacted something, go over the document again with a black marker over the correction tape.

[Paul Nutteing (valid email add]

I just use gummed labels, dust the gum with talcum powder to reduce the gumminess and you can easily remove after copying or scanning eg scanned-in example of mine

a Forensic "Science" Service document

ps What they aren't telling you about DNA profiles and what Special Branch don't want you to know.

nutteingd in a search engine.

Valid email nutteing@fastmail.....fm (remove 4 of the 5 dots) Ignore any other apparent em address used to post this message - it is defunct due to spam.

[Tim S]

Paul Nutteing (valid email address in post script ) coughed up some electrons that declared:

Personally I think the only surefire way is to copy the original, cut out the words then copy again.

Anything that attempts to blank over the original leaves the chance that image enhancement software might just be able to highlight the original print. Black PVC tape (electrical) is probably pretty safe but if you physically remove the redacted words, then no amount of clever post processing will get them back.

Call me paranoid...

Cheers

Tim

[nightjar]

It used to be possible to buy a black tape for direct masking of printed circuit boards when etching them. It came in rolls of various widths, some quite wide enough to mask text. It is a long time since I made PCBs that way, I changed to photo etching many years ago, but electronics supplies may well still sell the tape. I used to buy it from RS Components.

Colin Bignell

[Cicero]

========================================= If you're prepared to photocopy several hundred pages *twice* you might find it easier and less time-consuming to scan the pages into a word processor using OCR (Optical character recognition) software. You would then be able to use standard 'search and replace' to replace any names with any other random set of characters or even hide the text with white highlighting. You would also have a permanent record of your documents.

Cic.

[Dead Paul]

What happened to tippex? Doesn't anyone use it anymore?

[Bob Mannix]

Elfin safety. They made it water based so (a) it doesn't work very well and (b) there's no fun in sniffing it. Sales plummeted

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Postit thingies?

[Ian Jackson]

Yellow Post-It notes (cut to size, as necessary).

[johnmids2006]

If you want narrow black pvc tape, then an easy source are car accessory shops. They keep tape of various widths that is used for putting lines and stripes on cars.

As regards cropping out using software on a pc, I cannot think of any scanning/priniting utility offhand where that is very easy and quick to do.

[Toby]

Scan to the computer, but not OCR'd (because this induces errors) Once all on the computer, digitally remove/blank out the data, then print.

(You can save the document in it's original form, and the edited form, in case you need more copies, or different data removed later.

Toby...

[Andy Dingley]

Scalpel. On a first gen photocopy if you don't want to hurt the original. Nothing else is trustworthy - the track record of other techniques, including stickers is very poor. Copying from double-sided prints on thin paper is especially risky! You also need good proofreading afterwards to check that none were missed.

There's also the problem of reading the missing text simply by measuring the size of the hole left behind! (Yes, been done)

The NSA's redaction manual is a good read.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I use scan plus image editing software

Then print the amended scans.

Narrow black tape used to be what printed circuit people used to make circuit masters. All done in software now.

If you can find someone to scan fast onto a CD, do it and hen simply load into a program and blank electronically.

[Rick Hughes]

If you cut rather than just place a blocl of colour on top, it can't show through.

>

[matthew.larkin]

Just don't do what the FIA did when there was the McLaren spy scandal

- issue a redacted pdf of the proceedings with some text highlighted black to anonymise some names. When they published the pdf, all you had to do was to highlight the blacked out words and you could read the inverse!!

Matt

[Big Les Wade]

johnmids2006 posted

I use the Kodak Imaging for Windows package that came with one of my scanners. Use it to scan each page either as a multi-page TIFF file or separately. To redact, you simply use the "block select and fill with black" tool to mark the bits you want hidden. Anything inside your selected block is completely blacked out.

Of course scanners are a lot slower than photocopiers, but the above process might not be as tedious as fiddling with little bits of electrician's tape on paper.

[Paul Nutteing (valid email add]

Just don't do what the FIA did when there was the McLaren spy scandal

- issue a redacted pdf of the proceedings with some text highlighted black to anonymise some names. When they published the pdf, all you had to do was to highlight the blacked out words and you could read the inverse!!

Matt

Or electronically sending as a suposedly redacted Word document , has been done.

For printed redacting this was a fun excercise in deciphering

the scanned version is no longer there, or on wayback, so paper archives only

ps What they aren't telling you about DNA profiles and what Special Branch don't want you to know.

nutteingd in a search engine.

[Old Git]

That was my first thought but the OP doesn't make it clear as to whether the pages are double sided or single. Cutting out on double sided would bring in the problem of removing wanted text on the reverse side.