All digital documents contain metadata, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Metadata is just hidden information about a document, usually not very interesting information. But hidden information is hard to evaluate because, well...it's hidden. Some of that hidden information could be embarrassing and some could be downright damaging. PDFs are digital documents, and hence they contain metadata. Fortunately, Adobe Acrobat gives us a way to quickly find, and delete if we choose, that hidden data. The trick is to know where to look. Unfortunately, if you look under all of the menus in Acrobat you won't find a choice labelled 'Metadata.' The command you're looking for is called "Examine Document" which is under the DOCUMENTS menu choice. See the screenshot below:
Once you select this option your PDF will open a panel on the left hand side and start to run an analysis of the document, as shown by the red arrow marked #1 below. The #2 red arrow points to the types of information that have been found. You'll note that this document contains "metadata" and "bookmarks," which would be considered a type of "markup" in Acrobat. Comments and highlighting are also considered forms of "markup."
So the next question is, obviously: how do you remove the metadata and other markups? And the answer it found next to the red #3 arrow in the screenshot below. You just click on the button that is labeled "Remove."
But before we do that let's go back and look at the left panel again because you'll note that we have choices as to what we remove. That is, it's not an all-or-nothing deal. We can cherry pick what we want to have taken out. After all, we might want to leave the bookmarks in the document. So, these are the choices:
If we're happy with the choices that are selected (in this case all) then we click that "Remove" button and Acrobat will purge all of that information. But, the changes aren't locked in yet. If you look in the lower left hand area you'll see this important notification:
Once you save the document (or save it as a new document, if you prefer) then the changes will be locked in. So that's how you get rid of metadata, and comments and bookmarks. Frankly, I think it would have been better if Adobe had put these tools in the same area where you examine the document properties (which we talked about in the last two posts). It seems to me that once you shouldn't have to go to two different places to "examine the document." In Acrobat X the process is a little easier to find because the command is labelled "Remove Hidden Information" as the screenshot below depicts:
I hope that helps folks understand how to use this important tool in Acrobat. It's features like this that make me cringe when I hear lawyers recommending some less expensive alternative to Acrobat. Yes, I realize that Acrobat is a costly tool. But it's also a very powerful one, and versatile as well. Lawyers who want to have the options to sanitize documents and do all sorts of other important tasks should spend less time worrying about saving a few dollars and more time learning how to take advantage of all the useful features in Acrobat. What's that saying about "Penny wise and pound foolish"? Final note: The ability to remove metadata is part of Acrobat versions 8 and above.
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