How to remove time & author metadata from PDF edits?
September 4, 2012 12:29 PM   Subscribe

Is it possible to remove specific metadata (i.e., timestamps and review/commentor name but NOT the actual edits & comments) from a PDF in Acrobat X?

Hi folks,

Sorry if this one's obvious. In Word, you can remove personal data and document properties from a Word doc while retaining the actual comments, edits, and annotations made in Tracked Changes. (In other words, if you make an edit with TC on, and then inspect the doc, remove personal data, and then save it, you get comments & changes with zero metadata in the individual edit's properties. All tracked changes show up as made by "Author" and with no timestamp.)

Is there a way to do this with PDFs? All information I can find on this topic treats both the comment properties and the comment itself as the same piece of metadata, so I can clear out all of the comments and markup (via "Remove Hidden Information" or "Sanitize"), but which will leave me with the original text with no overlay of edits. Currently, I have Acrobat X Pro on one computer and 9 on another, both PCs. Ideally there's a way to do this in both versions, but if only one has this feature, that's also fine!

Nutshell version: We want to mark comments & edit PDFs, but we don't want the viewer to be able to tell who did the marking/from which computer or when. Is this possible?

Thanks again!
posted by alleycat01 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
Can you use another tool to add comments and just omit adding the author information to that? Doing a quick Google, maybe something like PDFill? I am mostly a Mac user and have found a variety of PDF processing tools other than Adobe. Perhaps there are some for the PC.
posted by procrastination at 2:16 PM on September 4, 2012


Can you export all comments (Comment sidebar --> Comments List --> Options menu button --> "Export all to Data file", which exports to 'FDF' format), anonymize them via find/replace or some FDF editor, and them import them back in? Royal pain, but maybe doable.
posted by misterbrandt at 2:27 PM on September 4, 2012


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