PDF - Feature request! [Redaction in the news]

[bezbozhnik]

Looking at the widely reported cock-up by the US military, in the case of Calipari's killing, I was thinking a redaction feature would be a desirable feature that ought to be fairly low-cost to implement.

I would see a redaction feature as working something like this:

- Text to be blanked is marked-up with a kind of strikethrough
- When document is exported to PDF, an option is shown to "use redaction rules" switch
- On: All struck-through text is replaced by a black bar. (The text itself /must not/ be inserted in the exported document /in any way/.)
- Off: Special-Struck-Through text is printed normally.

A feature as simple as that would spare OO users with redaction needs the kind of embarassment that the US Army's just been squirming in. It sounds like it wouldn't need much more than a little bit of work on the UI, the PDF converters and a new "style" in the schema.

There are a lot of record manager professionals around the world who would be very interested in a feature like that. If anyone's got any more thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them.

[David]

Select text and change font colour and highlight colour to black. Do a macro, or style for this if repeating?

David.

[bezbozhnik]

> Select text and change font colour and highlight colour to black. Do a macro, or
> style for this if repeating?

Sure, the requirement revolves around assigning some special style to the classified text in the original, but, on export to a new copy (typically PDF), the classified text must not be present - only some place holder such as XXX or black highlight.