Ref. Ares(2016)4162935 - 05/08/2016
TRANSPARENCY 
Access to documents 
European Commission– SG B4 
 
Newsletter n° 5 (update) 
2 July 2015 
Partial access: Adobe Acrobat Professional
 
Granting partial access following access-to-documents requests often implies redacting 
documents. It is highly recommended to use Adobe Acrobat Professional for this purpose. You 
can ask for installing it on your computer by sending a message to the IT Helpdesk (EC 
HELPDESK IT), with your Head of Unit in copy (cf. the example below). 
Open the .pdf version of a document in Adobe Acrobat Professional. Go to the "Bleak Out & 
Remove Content" tools available in the "Protection" section of the "Tools" menu on the right-
hand side. Click on "Mark for redaction" and once the parts to be redacted have been marked, 
confirm by click on "Apply redactions". The system will then ask you whether you would like also 
to find and remove hidden information in the document (metadata such as e.g. the documents' 
author). Please ALWAYS click on "yes", otherwise the redacted text, despite being masked, will 
still be easily reversible.  
Please note that the above-mentioned procedure only works with Adobe Acrobat Professional, 
not with the basic Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you use Acrobat Reader, please use the former 
procedure of printing – scanning – and resaving the redacted versions (as the redactions will 
otherwise remain reversible by the applicant). 
 
 
For more information : 
send an email to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xx.xxxxxx.xx
 
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