Issue Sanitizing after Redacting File - Corrupts File

I have a similar but related problem.

The presenting problem is basically wanting to use search in adobe to check a redacted version to see if anything was missed as a quality control issue.  We tried it and this is what happened.  We started out with 81 instances of the search term. We wanted some of them removed (11) which left 70 that were still legitimately in the document and should have shown up when we searched for them. But only 18 showed up.  So, there were still 52 instances that were in the document that didn’t show up on the search but where there.  The search function missed many pages (23!) where the term was still located, but search didn’t see it. 

So when we looked at the 52 pages, they were all “ fuzzy” ; they somehow were turned into images.  Then we looked for other pages that were fuzzy, but when we selected a word to search for that should appear in the search, it didn’t pick it up.  So it looks like when you redact (redbox) search still works, but when you apply (and then turn it into black box) it also turns the page it is on into an image.  So it is not searchable.  But it doesn’t always turn each page black boxed/sanitized into a fuzzy/image which we checked with other search terms.  Sometimes it didn’t.

I think the problem as I can best figure now is that once the document is redacted it somehow made some of it into an image.   

So my question given the above – what is causing it to become an image?  I looked in the original doc properties, but didn’t see anything about transparency setting.  What I do know is that the document we downloaded is said to have been an image, which may be the case, but it was searchable prior to redaction.  are searchable – maybe not image attachments.  My proof – we found the 81 instances and then still the 18.   So there seems to be something in the “second pass” by adobe when we apply the redaction that is causing a problem. 

Anyway, help! 

I have the same issue. When i redact a document and as soon as I sanitize the document the file is corrupted. I have downloaded and reinstalled the desktop app and still not working. Can you please help.

Hi Ian,

Thank you for reaching out.

As the PDFs become corrupted when sanitizing the file after redaction, could you please confirm if the issue occurs wot particular PDfs or with all? Try to save the PDF to a different location or with a different name, so you do not lose the original file.

Did you start experiencing this issue recently? 

Would you mind sharing any sample PDF with us so we can replicate the issue at our end?

Share the OS version you are working on.

Thanks,

Meenakshi