GC—006
Castoridae
PDF Beaver
Castor chartarius
Documents arrive from other people, and they are never in the shape you need. This is the bench you put them on. Load a stack of files down the left, open them one at a time, and do the four things that actually get done to a document you have been sent: read it, take the text out of it cleanly, black out what should not travel any further, and combine what matters into a single PDF. Nothing is uploaded, because nothing needs to be.
Almost out
The short account
- Habitat
- Anyone who is sent PDFs and emails and has to do something with them — lawyers, accountants, researchers, journalists, administrators
- Range
- A desktop browser. Everything runs in the page
- Field marks
- Text extraction that rejoins broken lines · redaction flattened to images so no text layer survives · Outlook .msg and .eml opened as readable text · combine ticked files into one paginated PDF · export to a text file or a Word file
- Where it lives
- Your browser. Files are opened from your disk and never sent anywhere
- Provenance
- It began as two creatures. Text Mole did the extraction, the beaver did the redaction; the mole has retired into the beaver, and its engine is what reads your PDFs
- Status
- Almost out — built and in use, in final testing
How it goes
Load the stack
Drop in PDFs, emails, images and text files. They list down the left in bundle order; one is open at a time.
Work on one
A PDF gets a Text and a Redact view. Read it, lift the text out, or black out the names, numbers and addresses that should not be shared. Whatever you do stays with the file when you switch views.
Take it away
Copy the text, save it as a text or Word file, or tick several documents and combine them into one PDF with page numbers.
Everything it does
- Getting the text out
- PDF text arrives broken into fragments, and most tools hand you the wreckage. This measures the margins and rejoins the lines that belong together, splits columns where a page has them, and lets you take a page range rather than the lot. There is a ledger of what came off each page, so you can see where a passage came from · copy it, save it as a text file, or export it as a Word document
- Redaction that holds
- Two modes: Quick works on the text layer, Careful reads the page optically for documents that were scanned. Give it a term list and it will also suggest the names it has found, then sweep for identity numbers, addresses, letterheads and near-misses of your terms. The result is flattened to images, so there is no text layer left underneath for anyone to select. Your term list and settings persist across the files in the stack, so one list serves a whole set
- Email that opens
- .eml and Outlook .msg files open as readable text with their headers and attachments listed, and print to PDF like anything else. This is the format that usually needs a licence and a colleague with Outlook
- Combining
- Tick what you want, in the order you want it, and get one PDF with continuous page numbering and optional title pages between documents
The documents never leave your machine. Files are opened from your own disk, read in the page, and written back to your downloads. There is no upload, no account, and no server that could hold a copy. For documents under a confidentiality obligation that is not a convenience, it is the requirement.
Questions people actually ask
Is anything uploaded?
No. The files are read in your browser and never sent anywhere.
Can redaction be undone by someone I send it to?
No. The redacted pages are flattened to images, so there is no text layer beneath the black boxes to select or search. This is the failure that embarrasses people who black things out in a word processor.
Will it catch a signature or handwriting?
No. Redaction matches text, so anything handwritten has to be caught by eye. Check the result before you send it.
What about Outlook .msg files?
They open as readable text with the headers and the attachment list. A message whose body is compressed RTF will show its headers and attachments only.
Can it combine Word documents?
Export them to PDF first, then combine. Word files come in as text rather than as pages.
Does it do OCR?
Careful mode reads a scanned page optically so that it can find terms to redact. It is not a general document-to-text converter for scans.