Post #4279374

2026-03-16 13:05 UTC

“Better safe than sorry” For release 0.5.0 of #Censor, a lot of work went into improving the security of PDF redaction. PDF documents are tricky, and irrevocably removing elements from them is even more. With this release, before saving a redacted document, garbage is now properly collected and documents are sanitized, which means that metadata, page thumbnails, etc. are removed. Also, vector graphics are now removed with a more strict option when they overlap with redaction rectangles. On top of that, I added redaction of PDF annotations. The user interface was refreshed: with undo and redo buttons in the toolbar and improved document saving experience. Drawing rectangles is now indicated by a crosshair cursor. Thanks to the translators, you may now talk also Czech with Censor! Get it from @flathub@floss.social: https://flathub.org/apps/page.codeberg.censor.Censor, or contribute on @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de: https://codeberg.org/censor/Censor #censorship #redaction #PDF #Codeberg #Flatpak #Flathub #GNOME #python #MuPDF #PyMuPDF #linux

Replies (1)

@mahlzahn@nerdculture.de 2026-03-16 13:26

That said and celebrated ;), there are things that #Censor is not yet well redacting. The upstream library #MuPDF (with its #Python bindings in #PyMuPDF) supports by default only redaction of text, vector graphics and images. Testing on a variety of PDF files (thanks to #pypdf, #qpdf, #ghostscript, and their issue reporters, as well as @pdfarranger@fosstodon.org for their hint) let me discover that some vector graphics are not properly redacted and an upstream issue has been reported for that. Also, form fields (widgets), signatures and links may be incompletely redacted. You can find an updated list of “What is redacted? What not?” here: https://codeberg.org/censor/Censor/issues/120 #pdf #redaction #security

Open ##4279371