The other day I needed to put my signature on a PDF, so I used PDFPen to do so, but noticed that I could still move the signature even after saving it and tried to use the “Merge Imprint into Page” option, but found that it didn’t work either (their support confirmed that due to changes in PDFs, this feature was kind of useless and should be removed). My solution was to print out the PDF and scan it back in; my signature was definitely imprinted on the PDF as the entire PDF was a bitmap image. I kind of forgot about this until today.
I heard about the TSA document leak on the news and searched for it. Wired had a lot of information including a link to a document that explains how to properly redact information. The basic idea is to save the PDF as a multi-page TIFF, then convert the TIFF to a PDF. While PDFPen, this is easy:
- Open PDF in PDFPen.
- Add signature and other information that you don’t want editable.
- Save PDF as TIFF.
- Open TIFF in PDFPen (or Preview).
- Save file as PDF.
Presto! Now the PDFPen folks just need to adds this as an option to eliminate the steps. I realize that this significantly increases the file size, but it does accomplish my goal.