The identifiers command

A report has to be published with every name, date and reference removed, and reading forty pages by eye for them is how things get missed.

Finds what in a document would stop it being anonymous: names, dates, references, anything that ties it to a person or a matter. It is the survey that comes before redaction: you cannot black out what you have not found, and reading a long document by eye for identifiers is exactly the task people are worst at. Nothing is changed; what to do about each finding is blackout or redact.

How you run it

caseleaf identifiers report.pdf

What each part means

In full, every part it will take:

caseleaf identifiers <file>

The document, and nothing else.

Each find's page, kind and the words it matched. The words, because a count cannot be reviewed.

What comes back

Asked of a short sample document, it answers as below. The sample has eight sheets, a highlight and a note left by a reviewer, a web link, a small table, two pictures and one form field already filled in.

{
  "identifiers" : 3,
  "kinds" : {
    "date" : 2,
    "reference" : 1
  },
  "where" : [
    {
      "at" : 65,
      "in" : "page",
      "kind" : "reference",
      "length" : 7,
      "page" : 2,
      "says" : "CV-0148"
    },
  … and the rest of the answer

The same thing from AppleScript

Everything above can be asked for from a script instead. There is one AppleScript command, perform: on names the document, and options takes the rest exactly as you would type it.

tell application "CaseLeaf"
    perform "identifiers" on "/path/to/report.pdf"
end tell

All the commands · Asking from a script · Contents