PDF Metadata Remover

Why another save is not enough

A PDF can be updated by adding new objects and a new cross-reference table to the end. A viewer follows the newest revision, but the old /Info dictionary can remain readable in the earlier bytes. Adding an empty author field at the end does not remove what was already there.

NoWatermark writes a new document rather than an incremental update. In a local convenience corpus of 733 PDFs from one developer machine, weighted towards documentation, we measured 27 files (3.7%) with metadata surviving in a superseded revision. That is evidence that the trap occurs in real files, not an estimate for PDFs in general.

Refusal is a correct result

Encrypted PDFs are refused rather than modified. A document whose structure cannot be rebuilt safely is also refused, not guessed at. In either case the original is left alone; refusing is the correct outcome when a faithful rebuild cannot be verified.

For the versioned, signal-by-signal account of what NoWatermark detects, removes and verifies, see the Capabilities page in the navigation above.

What this does not promise

Embedded file attachments are carried over and must be checked separately. The text content of the document itself is not analysed.

This is metadata removal, not redaction. It does not inspect the words, images or other visible content for information you should not release, and it does not declare a document safe to share.

Privacy

The scan runs entirely inside your browser. Your file is read from disk into memory, inspected there, and never uploaded — you can disconnect from the internet after this page loads and everything still works.