ReasonableRedactor

A small local tool that redacts Bcc and masks email usernames in PDFs while keeping the domain.

Examples:

• j.bloggs@example.org becomes [redacted]@example.org
• Bcc: alice@example.com, bob@example.com becomes Bcc: [redacted] and any wrapped continuation lines are removed

This keeps documents readable while removing personal identifiers.

Safety and privacy

• Your PDFs stay on your computer.
• Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
• The tool reads PDFs from the in folder and writes new PDFs to the out folder.

What you need

• Windows 10 or Windows 11
• Python 3.10+ installed

If you do not have Python installed:

1. Go to the official Python site and install it.
2. During install, tick "Add Python to PATH".

Quick start (easy way)

1. Put your PDFs into the in folder.
2. Double click RUN.bat.
3. When asked "Edit settings?", type y if you want to change defaults.
4. Get the redacted PDFs from the out folder.

If RUN.bat does not work

Some Windows setups flash a window and close, or block batch files. No problem, you can run ReasonableRedactor manually.

Command Prompt method (recommended)

1. Open Command Prompt:

   • Press the Windows key
   • Type cmd
   • Press Enter

2. Go to the folder where you extracted this tool. Example: # ReasonableRedactor

A small local tool that redacts Bcc and masks email usernames in PDFs while keeping the domain.

Examples:

• j.bloggs@example.org becomes [redacted]@example.org
• Bcc: alice@example.com, bob@example.com becomes Bcc: [redacted] and any wrapped continuation lines are removed

This keeps documents readable while removing personal identifiers.

Safety and privacy

• Your PDFs stay on your computer.
• Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
• The tool reads PDFs from the in folder and writes new PDFs to the out folder.

What you need

• Windows 10 or Windows 11
• Python 3.10+ installed

If you do not have Python installed:

1. Go to the official Python site and install it.
2. During install, tick "Add Python to PATH".

Quick start (easy way)

1. Put your PDFs into the in folder.
2. Double click RUN.bat.
3. When asked "Edit settings?", type y if you want to change defaults.
4. Get the redacted PDFs from the out folder.

If RUN.bat does not work

Some Windows setups flash a window and close, or block batch files. No problem, you can run ReasonableRedactor manually.

Command Prompt method (recommended)

1. Open Command Prompt:

   • Press the Windows key
   • Type cmd
   • Press Enter

2. Go to the folder where you extracted this tool. Example: cd /d "C:\Tools\ReasonableRedactor"

3. Install requirements: py -m pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run: py src\reasonableredactor.py

Optional: double click the Python file

If your computer is already set up to run Python files, you can also try opening: src\reasonableredactor.py

If it opens in a text editor or does nothing, use the Command Prompt method above.

Settings (simple)

When you run the tool, it asks if you want to edit settings.

You can choose:

• Clean style (recommended), it blends into the page with no big black bars
• Blackout style, it uses black boxes with white replacement text

You can also choose:

• Mask all email addresses (recommended for publishing PDFs)
• Or mask only a personal list

You can keep certain addresses visible (optional):

• Keep emails, example: contact@example.org
• Keep domains, example: example.org

Your settings are saved into config.json.

Notes

• This performs real PDF redactions using PyMuPDF redaction annotations and applies them.
• Some PDFs contain text as images. In that case, text masking may not catch everything.