On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:41:58 +0000, Joerg wrote:

Dunno, but I would not crop (out) sensitive material with Word.
Chances are very good it's still there in the file somewhere.

I suspect the same is true of Adobe :-(

Methinks if you edit everything in MS-Word, then when all the I's are
dotted and T's are crossed store it as PDF, shouldn't it all be gone?

It depends upon the nature of the edits.

E.g. if you "redact" information by making the background match the
foreground (i.e. black text on black background = black box), you'll
probably end up with the same information in the PDF.

Similarly, if you crop an imported PS/PDF/etc figure in Word, the PDF may
well contain the complete figure, nested inside a clip rectangle.

If you need to be sure that information isn't being hidden, you need to
either look at the source (which largely rules out complex binary
formats), or convert to a relatively low-level format which doesn't have
the ability to retain "hidden" information (e.g. render to a raster image
format).