Ubuntu – Remove text information from a PDF

pdfsoftware-recommendation

I printed a recent credit card statement straight to PDF and used PDFEdit to black out (highlight in black) the information I'd prefer not to share with the party I need to send this to. Now I can't seem to find a way to save the document so that the text isn't there, hiding under the black bars.

I tried to flatten it, but that hasn't resolved the issue.

I tried printing to PDF, but the text information is all preserved. I tried opening it in OOo Writer and I get an error.

Is there a method available to me (in 10.04) to save the PDF as an image, functionally?

I thought "flattening" would achieve that but I'm obviously missing something.

Best Answer

Openoffice

Install the PDF Import Extension from Oracle into your Extension Manager for OpenOffice and you will be able to open and edit your PDF files inside of OpenOffice Draw. Which will create all the elements (text, lines, drawings, etc.) and you will be able to remove those that you don't wish. A screenshot is here:

enter image description here

Gimp

If you prefer to handle your pdf pages as layers and edit'em as images, then you can right click the PDF file and choose "Open with GIMP Image Editor", the "Import from PDF" dialog will show after opening gimp and will allow you to choose which pages you wish to edit with several options as shown in the next screenshot.

enter image description here

After which you will also be able to edit those pages as shown in this screenshot:

enter image description here

Good luck!

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