Redaction in its sanitization sense (as distinguished from its other editing sense) is the blacking out or deletion of text in a document, or the result of such an effort. It is intended to allow the selective disclosure of information in a document while keeping other parts of the document secret. Typically the result is a document that is suitable for publication or for dissemination to others than the intended audience of the original document. For example, when a document is subpoenaed in a court case, information not specifically relevant to the case at hand is often redacted. Another example is patient information of hospitals, which is distributed to be used for research purposes.

A new document redaction feature for Collabora Office is being developed, and it will also be available on the next major version of LibreOffice. This new feature will provide a much more efficient means than the traditional print-redact-scan process, and will try to prevent also the accidental leakage of redacted information by completely removing them in the resulting PDF document, rather than just hiding.