You’re thinking about this as a nerd.

It’s not a tools problem, it’s a problem of malicious compliance and contempt for the law.

Even the previous justice departments struggled with PDFs. The way they handled it was scrubbing all possible metadata and uploading it as images.

For example, when the Mueller reports were released with redactions, they had no searchable text or meta data because they were worried about this exact kind of data leaks.

However, vast troves of unsearchable text is not a huge win for transparency.

PDFs are just a garbage format and even good administrations struggle.