[ohithereyou]

1) Irrelevant in the case of this court filing as the lawyer's name is attached

2) In the case where this might be relevant there's a much easier way - export PDF pages to high resolution PNG, edit to put a black box over the text, and then combine the PNGs into a PDF again. This also has the benefit of stripping any PDF metadata that may have been present in the original.

[loeg]

FWIW, (2) doesn't strip any sort of steganographic watermark that might already be embedded in the document, but invisible to the naked eye. Of course, there's no reliable way to do that, anyway. And steganography could be used in ways that are visible to the human eye (i.e., survives printing/scanning) but still imperceptible with a single copy of the document.

[ohithereyou]

You can strip the steganographic watermark by having somebody retype the information from the document, but that doesn't defeat the barium meal.

[loeg]

Not necessarily! Consider rearranged words or punctuation in different versions of the document. You'd have to do something like type up a paraphrase to get around that.