Redacting by converting to TIFF and back to PDF

PDFCreator PDFCreator English
1

I’m trying to redact some information from a PDF in such a way that the information is impossible to recover. My plan for doing this is to:


  1. Draw a rectangle over the stuff to be redacted using FoxIt reader.
  2. Print to a TIFF file using PDFCreator.
  3. Use the “Actions” menu to automatically print the TIFF back to a PDF.
My question has to deal with Step 2 of this process. When PDFCreator converts the PDF to a TIFF, does it preserve any information about the “layers” or objects in the original PDF, or is it a “flat” TIFF? Obviously, I’m hoping that all information about objects in the original PDF is destroyed so the stuff I’m trying to redact can’t be recovered. Is any metadata from the original PDF preserved?

If the three steps above don’t make sense, here is a document I created detailing the process.

Thanks!