strip-metadata

name	strip-metadata
description	Remove all metadata from a PDF — author, title, producer, creation date, comments, embedded XMP, and document info dictionary. Useful before sharing or printing externally. Triggers on phrases like "strip metadata", "remove author info", "scrub PDF metadata", "anonymize this PDF".

Strip PDF Metadata

Wipe all identifying metadata from a PDF.

Inputs

• Input PDF path (required).
• Output path (optional) — defaults to <input>-clean.pdf.

What gets stripped

• Document Info dictionary: /Title, /Author, /Subject, /Keywords, /Creator, /Producer, /CreationDate, /ModDate.
• XMP metadata stream.
• Annotations and comments (optional, ask user).

Tooling

exiftool is the most thorough — it handles both legacy Info dict and XMP.

Recipe

exiftool -all:all= -overwrite_original_in_place=false -o output.pdf input.pdf

To also remove XMP and re-linearize cleanly, follow up with qpdf:

qpdf --linearize output.pdf output-final.pdf && mv output-final.pdf output.pdf

Verification

exiftool output.pdf
pdfinfo output.pdf

Both should show empty/default values for Author, Title, Producer, etc.

Caveats

• Producer and Creator may repopulate if downstream tools touch the file. Run strip-metadata last in any pipeline.
• Embedded fonts and form metadata are not stripped — this skill targets identifying info only.

Output

Metadata-stripped PDF. Original preserved.