Acrobat Pro DC Redaction Tool Properties - Box Height or Overlay Text alignment changes?

[B Christie]

Checked the web & forums, no joy. Version in use Acrobat Pro DC 2015 Release (Classic) Version 2015.006.30119

Issue:  Redaction of text clips the bottom of the row above due to redaction tool selection box height attributes.  Initially desire to redact with white fill. Unacceptable result. I have an option to insert word "[Reserved]" using Properties Appearance\Use Overlay Text, and Redacted Area Fill Color set to "none" or "white" but I get the same result, regardless of Font Size set.

Text alignment is Top justified and I cannot see how to change this.  I can Left/Center/Right justify text alignment, but not vertically.  If bottom justify was available I believe it would work.

Is there a way, with the version in hand to either adjust the redaction tool box height (for text redaction, not image) or to force bottom justify of the Overlay Text desired?

The only immediate solution I can find is to hover outside the test to get the cross-hair selector, size my own box and then apply redaction, but I'm sure you can image what a chore that is for some documents. Any ideas from the community for any other workaround solutions?

I would respectfully offer that adding a feature to future upgrades [Redaction Tool Properties\Overlay Text\Text Alignment\ (3 new icons for Top/Middle/Bottom)] would be helpful for many users.

Cheers, B.

[ob39753593 · Accepted solution]

For those who were frustrated by this lack of adjustability, as I was, I have a workaround at least:

Using Acrobat XI

The problem apparently lies with the the size of the boxes in which text objects are located in the document.  If for some reason the box heights overlap or the line spacing isn't the default for the font used, when you redact or highlight or use any such tool, it overwrites or even wipes out the lines above and/or below.  Programs like Word or even Photoshop can easily manipulate the line spacing and text height, and I'm shocked that Acrobat can't do it.  Be that as it may...

The trick is to reassign the box heights somehow.  I was able to do this by printing to PDF, and in the "Advanced" tab, check the "save as image" box.  Set the DPI to something reasonable (150 worked for me, otherwise OCR takes much longer.  300 should be okay though.  See below).  This writes the entire document to a new file as pages of single images.

Take this new file and go to Tools -> text recognition, and run that for all the pages.  This gives you back a document much like you started with, but with new boxes heights for each line which you can then redact is it should.

Note that depending on the DPI you select, the text may be fuzzy.  If it's too fuzzy, increase the DPI when you print to PDF.  The document also likely will be larger.