A customer of ours recently asked if we could request the capability to use annotations (redactions in particular) with native PDF documents in a similar/consistent manner to how they work for Image documents. The use case is for a FOIL process:
Various departments are submitting information into Laserfiche as attachments on a Form. The attachments may be in a handful of different file formats, and Forms does not automatically generate pages or OCR these files as they get saved to the repository. In some cases, the attachments may need to be redacted before they can be sent out to the requester. It is inconvenient to have to generate pages for all of these PDF documents by hand (cannot be done with Workflow either, however we are aware that it could be done with the SDK using CAT). This also leads to challenges when a document in Laserfiche has both an original, non-redacted PDF component and a generated set of pages that are redacted. The request coordinators need to be careful to email out the correct component of the file to make sure the redacted document is what gets sent out to the requester (we have built some workflows to help prevent this from happening).
We understand there may be technical limitations, since this is a complicated file format and Laserfiche mostly uses 3rd party libraries to interact with PDFs. We also know that you can open the PDF outside Laserfiche and redact it there, but native support for annotations would go a long way towards making this process easier.
Thank You!