Intentionally blur pdf pages

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
December 2, 2022
3 replies
8807 views

Hello everyone.

Does anyone know of an easy way to intentionally "Blur" the pages of a PDF document?

I have about 100 documents ranging in size From 1 to 20 pages each

Each of the Documents are proprietary and Are sold to subscribers

I would prefer to put the blurred pdf on my store to give propective customers a sense for the material but obviously not the usable document until after actual purchase

Ty

This topic has been closed for replies.

bebarth

Community Expert

Do you want all pages are unreadable?

Else you could apply a watermark with a slight transparency from an image (a photosop cloud effect for example)!

You can also convert all texts to outlines with the flattener preview tool to avoid the copy/paste of the text...

@+

S

ShaneMSweet@gmailAuthor

New Participant

Ty. Yes..i dont want the text readable

Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G, an AT&T 5G smartphone
Get Outlook for Android<>

Shane Sweet

gary_sc

Community Expert

Just one other thought regarding using Photoshop to blur (Gaussian Blur) the text: the document's size will go off the charts.

The size of a PDF is governed by many things, but pixel-based images are probably the biggest contender. That is, a letter-sized PDF containing just one image can easily be 5-20 MB in size. That same PDF, if the image is text, could be about 100 kb. That text page is now no longer text but a pixel-based image. Now multiply that by 100 pages.

You see where this is going.

Can you substitute some "Lorem Ipsum" text for this process?

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

Good point Gary, I would make a hybrid document with some text and some blurred text images, the images can be very low res, (or optimized for size after pdf export) which would reduce the size.

try67

Community Expert

I don't believe that's possible in Acrobat. You would need to export the pages as images and then transform them using something like Photoshop to achieve this kind of effect, and then re-create a new PDF from those images.