[xep-support] PDF redaction strategy

[David E Nedrow]

I've been looking for a way to mark certain items for redaction. I  
would basically like to add 'redact="true"' to any element that should  
be redacted. When the PDF is generated any elements marked for  
redaction are displayed as a black box whose sides are aligned with  
the content area of the element that would otherwise have been rendered.

The closest I've come is a suggestion on docbook-apps for the  
following...

<xsl:template match="text()[ancestor::*[@redact='yes']]">
	<xsl:value-of select="translate 
(.,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890-_=+! 
@#$%^&*();':"<>,./?',  
			'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 
')"/>
	<!-- Add other chars, e.g. accented chars and other 	languages, as  
needed -->
</xsl:template>

The output of this would be printed black on black. There are a couple  
of drawback...

1) It doesn't handle elements like <imagedata/>
2) It doesn't preserve the actual flow of the document, when compared  
to a non-redacted version. This is caused by a series of replacement  
letters will almost never match the content area of the "regular"  
output.

Has anyone ever used XEP for something similar to this? I'm thinking  
that perhaps between my customization layer and XEP, I could tell XEP  
to render the element as a black box.

Thoughts?

-David
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