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I have about 200 PDF scans that need to have information systematically removed. This information to remove includes a set of digits that may vary in length.

The current plan is to print each document out remove the information and re-scan it. I was hoping there would be a way to automate this process.

I have tried using Adobe Acrobat Pro's OCR and then find and replace functionality in Word, but I have run into a few problems. I can't figure out how to search for number in multiple Word documents and when I use OCR on the documents in Adobe Acrobat it finds pictures that are on the page and converts them to text.

If there is any software that may be able to automate this it would be really helpful.

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    Are these digits always at the same location on the page (e.g. bottom right corner), or are they within the text?
    – Tymric
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 19:51
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    They are always in approximately the same location. However, these are scanned documents so it is impossible to guarantee exact location.
    – thequantumguy01
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 23:35
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    I was thinking that blurring out a fixed selection in all the images would be easier than both printing and OCR
    – Tymric
    Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 0:10

1 Answer 1

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From your question/comments I gather that the PDFs contain images only.

1) Extract the images using a PDF image extractor like IweSoft PDF Image Extractor.

2) Blur the relevant text in the images

3) Assemble the images back into a new PDF using any tool you like (for creating PDFs there are hundreds of options, so I won't go into that)

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  • The issue that I have found with this is that the PDF files can be multiple pages, and when they are converted to images they split. I can't find a program that will recognize those images as part of a single file and batch convert them back to pdfs.
    – thequantumguy01
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 4:34
  • I was assuming one image per page. I used to use an extractor (forgot the name) that named the images sequentially.
    – user416
    Commented Oct 29, 2014 at 8:39
  • On Linux you could extract the images with pdfimages, batch process and convert all back to a single PDF both with convert/mogrify of ImageMagick
    – Pablo A
    Commented Feb 23, 2021 at 6:49

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