Hide information in a PDF file in Python

In Python, I have files generated by ReportLab. Now, i need to extract some pages from that PDF and hide confidential information.

I开发者_Python百科 can create a PDF file with blacked-out spots and use pyPdf to mergePage, but people can still select and copy-paste the information under the blacked-out spots.

Is there a way to make those spots completely confidential?

Per example, I need to hide addresses on the pages, how would i do it?

Thanks,

Basically you'll have to remove the corresponding text drawing commands in the PDF's page content stream. It's much easier to generate the pages twice, once with the confidential information, once without them.

It might be possible (I don't know ReportLab enough) to specially craft the PDF in a way that the confidential information is easier accessible (e.g. as separate XObjects) for deletion. Still you'd have to do pretty low-level operations on the PDF -- which I would advise against.

(Sorry, I was not able to log on when I posted the question...)

Unfortunately, the document cannot be regenerated at will (context sensitive), and those PDF files (about 35) are 3000+ pages.

I was thinking about using pdf2ps and pdf2ps back, but there is a lot of quality.

pdf2ps -dLanguageLevel=3 input.pdf - | ps2pdf14 - output.pdf

And if i use "pdftops" instead, the text is still selectable. If there is a way to make it non-selectable like with "pdf2ps" but with better quality, it will do too.