Yesterday I was preparing my taxes, and wanted to deduct my donation to the WikiMedia foundation. I couldn’t find an actual receipt, but I did have my bank statement, so I decided to just black out the other purchases. After I put a black box on them, Preview gave me a popup saying that the text would not actually be deleted, and that maybe I want to use the redact tool. I don’t know how long this has been around, but it is really cool. It allows you to select some text, and then blacks it out with Xs, and also actually deletes the text from the document, so it is no longer searchable (once you close the document, and re-open it). There is a tool called “redact” from the Tools menu. I’ll point you to a tutorial for more instructions. I was pleased that it also works quite well with data in columns, like I had.
While we are talking about Preview, I will also mention that it is super easy to combine pdfs with Preview. Open up two documents. Make sure that the thumbnails are open in the view settings. Then simply drag and drop the one document on the other. This is a bit hidden. If you hover your cursor over the title of a document, a little icon representing a pdf will appear. You can then click on this and drag it wherever you want. Dragging it to the thumbnail sidebar in a different Preview window will insert that page (or pages). If you drag it onto your web browser open to gmail, while you are composing an email, it will upload it as an attachment. If you drag it onto a Terminal window, it will paste in the path of the document. Pretty neat stuff!
Also, if you don’t already, I urge you to donate to Wikipedia. It is one of the best ideas of the internet. I only wish that there was a way so that I wouldn’t see the annoying donate banner anymore, since I already donate.