Perhaps an imagemagick pipeline dumping each page out as a png then blanking areas associated with a list of words (a pixel level concordance of the coordinates of all the words having been compiled from a text dump? Hand-waving here).
I'm probably overthinking this one but the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps? So three conspirators with names like Stonk, Hephalump and Pragma-Sasquatch would be sort of easy to distinguish between if the public had a limited list of people who might be involved?
> the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps?
Absolutely. It’s why officially-redacted documents typically take out entire sentences and paragraphs, wiping just names only sparingly.
> I'm probably overthinking this one but the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps?
You're definitely not overthinking this. Fitting words by length is the attack vector if the blanking itself has been done correctly.