sami155

Many tools do not fully remove metadata, but just remove the link with in the metadata table. The data are thus still available in the PDF file itself.

While a lot of people rely on Exiftool to remove metadata, it actually does the same in PDFs. If you remove metadata with exiftool -all= some.pdf, you can always restore the data with exiftool -pdf-update:all= some.pdf.

There are several options to remove PDF metadata safely:

Option 1 : Exiftool with qpdf

Remove metadata with exiftool : exiftool -all= some.pdf
Then remove ununsed objects with qpdf : qpdf --linearize some.pdf - > some.cleaned.pdf

Anonymising PDFs

PDF metadata

Metadata in PDF files can be stored in at least two places:

the Info Dictionary, a limited set of key/value pairs
XMP packets, which contain RDF statements expressed as XML

	// ==UserScript==
	// @name @chaoticvibing Twitter Blue Nerd - twitter.com
	// @namespace Violentmonkey Scripts
	// @match ://.twitter.com/*
	// @match ://.x.com/*
	// @grant none
	// @version 1.9.2
	// @author @chaoticvibing - GH @busybox11
	// @description 11/9/2022, 11:45:28 PM
	// @updateURL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/busybox11/53c76f57a577a47a19fab649a76f18e3/raw