See what your PDF says about you — fix it, or strip it. All in your browser
| Field | What it holds | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Document title | Browsers label the tab with it; Google shows it as the result title for indexed PDFs |
| Author | Author name | Often your real name from Word/Docs export — the #1 privacy leak in shared PDFs |
| Subject | Description line | Shown in File → Properties; some search indexes read it |
| Keywords | Search terms | Low SEO weight today, but it travels with the file everywhere |
| Creator | App that authored it | "Microsoft Word", "InDesign 19.0" — reveals your toolchain |
| Producer | PDF writer used | "macOS Quartz", "Ghostscript" — plus version details |
| CreationDate | When it was made | Timestamps can outlast revisions and edits |
| ModDate | When it last changed | Reveals late-night edits; this tool can set it to now or any date |
These eight live in the file's Info dictionary — the block every PDF reader displays under Properties. Some PDFs additionally carry XMP metadata (an XML block Acrobat writes); this editor edits the Info dictionary, which is what browsers, Google, and every Properties dialog show. Visible text on pages is content, not metadata — editing these fields never changes a word of it.
Two open-source engines split the work. pdf.js — Mozilla's PDF renderer — parses the file and hands over the Info dictionary exactly as a reader sees it. pdf-lib writes your changes back into a fresh copy of the file. Both run as JavaScript in this tab; the file is read with the browser's FileReader and returned as a Blob download.
Start from a 3-page report carrying a complete metadata set: 1,849 bytes. Amend the title to "Q3 Field Report (amended)" and shorten the author, Apply, and the download is 1,903 bytes — a 54-byte difference for a real two-field edit — with all 3 pages intact and re-reading the file in any viewer showing the new values. Now the other direction: Strip All on the same 1,849-byte file produces a 1,729-byte copy (−120 bytes), every text field an empty string, both dates still stamped, all 3 pages preserved. And filling a complete metadata set onto a bare 3-page PDF costs roughly 80 bytes — metadata is cheap, which is exactly why it accumulates unnoticed.
Open the PDF in a metadata editor, change the fields you care about — title, author, subject, keywords, dates — and save a copy. The metadata lives in the file's Info dictionary, a small block of text properties stored alongside the pages; editing it never touches the page content. This tool reads it with pdf.js and writes it with pdf-lib, both inside your browser, so contracts and reports never leave your machine. Adobe Acrobat exposes the same fields under File → Properties.
Open the file in a metadata editor with a strip function and clear every field: title, author, subject, keywords, creator, and producer all become empty strings, while the pages stay byte-for-byte intact. This tool's Strip all button does exactly that — in testing, a 3-page 1,849-byte report became a 1,729-byte file with every field blank and all 3 pages preserved. Two caveats: text you can see on the pages is content, not metadata, and it stays; and some PDFs carry XMP metadata, which older tools miss — this editor edits the Info dictionary, the block every reader displays.
Eight standard fields: Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator (the originating application), Producer (the PDF writer that made the file), CreationDate, and ModDate. A Word export typically carries your name as Author, 'Microsoft Word' as Creator, dates from when you wrote it, and sometimes the full file path. That's why metadata matters before you share: it can leak authorship and editing history you never meant to publish.
Usually, yes. Browsers and search engines prefer the PDF's Title field when labeling the tab or the search result — that's exactly why a broken title makes PDFs show up in Google as 'untitled' or as the raw filename. Setting a clean Title field is the single highest-value metadata edit for SEO on PDF content.
No. The metadata block is edited and the document objects are copied through; pages, fonts, images, and quality are untouched. The file size barely moves — in testing, adding a full set of metadata grew a bare 3-page PDF by roughly 80 bytes, and stripping it back shrank the populated file by 120 bytes. If you need structural changes, that's repair or compression territory, not metadata editing.
No — and no honest editor can write to an encrypted PDF without the password, because the file's contents are scrambled. The tool detects encryption on open and tells you. Decrypt the file first (open it with the password in any reader and re-export, or use a repair tool that accepts the password), then edit the metadata on the unencrypted copy.