Error Message

Items in the Header or Footer of a PDF document appear as though they are being redacted when being printed.

Most office scanners can scan a physical document to PDF, however these PDFs are not a true PDF. Instead they are images of the original document that have been scanned in as an image format, and then saved in a PDF wrapper. Sometimes, depending on the settings, the background of these documents can be set to solid black since the foreground is going to be an image of a mostly white document. When text is added to the Header or Footer, a small rectangular box is cut into the image so the text in the background (behind the image) can be seen in the foreground. Since the background was set to black it appears that the header or footer was redacted.

There are two possible solutions to resolve this issue;

• For the first solution a 3rd party PDF writer will be required. Adobe Acrobat can export a PDF using a different writer than the default, and these writers may be able to change the settings to prevent the background from being black.
• The second solution would be to scan the physical document in as a Tiff instead of a PDF. The tiff can later be added to a true PDF or other document and text can be overlaid.