PDF Metadata Cleaner

What hidden information does a PDF carry, and how is it removed?

Shows everything a PDF quietly discloses about where it came from — your name, your software, folder paths off your drive, comment authors, hidden XML copies of the properties — then removes what you choose. It is not redaction, and the page says so.

A PDF carries far more than the document properties dialogue shows, and the same facts are usually stored twice — once in the trailer and again as an XML packet — so removing one leaves the other. A file that has passed through a CAD tool, a plotter driver and a markup application typically also carries the author's name against every comment, the full path of the source drawing off somebody's local drive, layer names that quote that path, and blocks of private data the producing application left for its own use. Cleaning here rebuilds the document from its object graph rather than appending a revision to it, which has a consequence worth understanding: anything no longer referenced is simply not copied across. A page that was deleted and saved rather than properly removed usually still exists inside the file, because an incremental save appends rather than replaces. A rebuild leaves it behind, at no extra cost. Two things follow that cannot be avoided. A digital signature signs a byte range, so rewriting the file invalidates it — that is precisely what a signature exists to do. And the tagged structure tree is never removed, because screen readers depend on it and trading an accessibility loss for a privacy gain is not a decision to make silently. Cleaning is worth doing before a drawing leaves the practice, whether it goes to a client directly or into a review in Xenmark.