How to see and remove the author name and other metadata in a PDF

A PDF carries a few fields about itself that most people never look at. The author field is the one that causes trouble. It is frequently a real name or a corporate username, and it travels with the document: a CV exported from a work laptop can arrive at a new employer carrying the old one’s domain.

The fields, and what the tool does with each

The document information dictionary is the set of named fields a PDF stores alongside its pages, defined in ISO 32000. It is read by almost everything that opens a PDF. The tool shows three of its fields and lets you rewrite them; the rest it either leaves alone or, in the case of the producer and the modification date, the library it saves with rewrites for you.

Field	Usually holds	In the tool	In the copy you download
Title	A title, if the software that made the file set one	Shown and editable	What you leave in the field, or nothing
Author	Often a real name or a corporate username	Shown and editable	What you leave in the field, or nothing
Subject	A short description, if anyone wrote one	Shown and editable	What you leave in the field, or nothing
Keywords	A list of terms	Not shown	Not changed by the tool
Creator	The application the document was made in	Not shown	Kept; set to the library’s name if it was empty
Producer	The PDF library that wrote the file	Not shown	Replaced with the name of the library the tool saves with
Creation date	When the file was first written	Not shown	Kept; set to now if it was empty
Modification date	When the file was last saved	Not shown	Set to the time you run the tool

The producer names the library that wrote the file, not the application you used. Many applications share a PDF library underneath, which is why it is often a name you will not recognise. You cannot edit it here, but its original value does not survive in this dictionary either, because the library the tool saves with writes its own name there.

How to see and clear it

1. Open PDF metadata and choose Add a PDF, or drop it onto the page. If the file has a password, type it into the box that appears and confirm it.
2. Look at the Title, Author and Subject fields. They fill in from the file as soon as it opens, so what you see is what the document says now. An empty field means the file has nothing there.
3. Clear the fields you want gone, or type new values. Clearing all three is allowed, and is the usual way to strip them.
4. Press the PDF metadata button. A line under the result says what was saved, for example that title, author and subject were removed.
5. Download the copy, which is named after the original with -metadata added, and send that one rather than the original.

A cleared field is written as empty, not left at its previous value. That is the difference between stripping metadata and appearing to.

What it cannot remove

The three fields cover what nearly everything reads. They are not everything a PDF can say about where it came from.

• Keywords, creator and the creation date are not offered for editing. If any of them is identifying, the tool will not clear it.
• An XMP packet is a separate block of metadata, written in XML, that some producers embed in addition to the document information dictionary. The tool does not rewrite it, so a name held there survives.
• Metadata attached to individual objects inside the file, rather than to the document, is not touched either.
• Anything on the pages themselves, such as a name in a header, a footer or a signature block, is page content, not metadata.
• Leftovers from pages deleted earlier stay in an unprotected file. The tool loads the document and saves it again, and that re-saves every object the file contained, which our measurement of lossless PDF compression showed includes the content of deleted pages.

Two side effects are worth knowing when the file was password-protected. The tool decrypts it into a fresh document before writing, so the copy you download has no password, and its keywords, creator and creation date do not carry over. If the document should stay locked, protect the clean copy again with Protect PDF.

For a document where this genuinely matters, the tool’s own advice is to print to a new PDF as well. On Windows, printing the pages from Microsoft Edge to the Microsoft Print to PDF printer makes a new file from them. We have not checked what metadata that printer writes, so look at the result before you send it.

Other ways to do it

To see every field, including the ones this tool does not show, poppler’s pdfinfo prints a file’s metadata on the command line:

pdfinfo input.pdf

There is no built-in method for editing these fields on macOS or Windows on the list we have checked.

Checking that nothing was uploaded

Cleaning a file because of what it says about you is a poor reason to send it to someone else’s server. Once the fields have filled in, which is when the page has fetched the code it needs, disconnect from the network, clear the fields and save. It works the same offline, because the reading and the writing both happen in the tab.

See what your file carries with PDF metadata, and if it is going out under a password, add one afterwards with Protect PDF.