A tenth app in Rutba Office: PDF, from putting pages in order to redaction that removes

Rutba Office had nine apps for a month. On 13 October 1.46 added a tenth, for PDFs, and by 1.49 on 14 October it did most of what an office needs a PDF tool for. It runs on your computer like everything else in the suite: the pages are drawn by pdf.js, which ships with the suite, so nothing is uploaded and it works with the network off.

Pages in the order you want

A PDF opens beside a strip of thumbnails, one page at a time, two side by side or in one column. The words can be selected and copied, and Find searches every page. Pages are picked with a click, Ctrl and Shift and dragged into a new order, rotated, deleted, extracted to a new file or inserted from another PDF. A file splits into so many pages at a time or at the pages you pick, and several files merge into one. Undo covers every change.

The detail that matters is how it saves. No page is redrawn: each one goes into the new file exactly as it was, with its fonts, pictures and text, so a contract that has been reordered is still the same contract. Since 1.49, bookmarks, page labels, links and form fields survive a save, an extract, a split and a merge too.

Scans you can search

Recognise Text (1.47) reads the words on scanned pages and writes them in as an invisible layer under each page, so Find, selecting and copying work on a scan. The pages look exactly as they did. The layer is added after the file’s original bytes, which stay as they were, and Undo takes it away. The reading happens on your computer: how the suite recognises text has the detail.

Comments, forms and a signature

• Comment and mark up (1.49): highlight, underline or strike through words, add sticky notes and text boxes, and draw freehand, boxes, circles, lines and arrows. Each comment is written into the file as Acrobat writes it, so other readers show it the same way, and the Comments pane lets you reply, resolve or delete.
• Forms fill in place, text, check boxes, radio buttons and lists, each value written so other readers show it.
• Fill & Sign places your signature or initials, typed, drawn on a pad, or from a photo of one signed on paper with the paper made see-through, along with today’s date, a tick or a few words.

Redaction that removes, rather than covers

A black box drawn over words is a well-known redaction mistake: the words are still in the file, and anybody can copy them out from underneath. In Rutba Office you mark what is to go with Mark Text, Mark Area or Mark Matches, and Apply Redactions takes the words and the pictures’ pixels out of the pages themselves.

It also looks for the same words everywhere else a PDF can hide them: the document’s properties and metadata, bookmarks, comments and their replies, links, attached files, form values and page labels. The dialog lists what else it found, and the result is a new file written whole, because an update appended to the old file would keep the old bytes inside it.

• Export as Pictures, PNG or JPEG at 72 to 600 dots an inch.
• Reduce File Size redraws pictures at the size the page needs and saves a smaller copy.

Every release since 1.46 has also been checked against a fuzzer of its own for the PDF reader, 900 deliberately damaged PDFs at a time. Each one is read or refused with a sentence saying why, and none fails or hangs. The one fault it ever found, in 1.47, was fixed before that release went out.