Re: Anonymize a pdf

Any non-standard metadata will likely not survive PDF->PDF conversion
through Ghostscript. And there's not "built-in" way to strip the
metadata we do preserve.

It is possible to do it, but it requires Postscript programming and the
use of a couple of Ghostscript extensions.

Also, you probably don't want to drop all metadata - you probably want
to preserve things like bookmarks. As all metadata are preserved by the
same mechanism, it need to be selective.


Anonymising font names seems like:
a) a totally pointless exercise (unless you use your own custom fonts,
in which case, anonymise the names yourself before you create the document).

and

b) a much, much more complex proposition, since the font names are not
simply strings in the PDF file, but are embedded inside the font data
streams, and for the most part, need to match everywhere they are used.

With, again, considerable Postscript wrangling, it's probably doable for
Postscript fonts, but I suspect it's not going to be viable for Truetype
fonts - at least, not in a way that isn't fairly trivially worked around.

Basically, this seems like something better done at creation time than
as a post-process procedure.

Chris


On 14/05/15 04:29, Paolo Bolzoni wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> Some conferences want anonymous paper.
> 
> Using LaTeX hyperref package it is easy to remove some metadata, like:
> Title, Subject, Author... but in the .pdf stays an annoying metadata
> called "PTEX.Fullbanner." Besides the fonts names are still visible.
> 
> So my question is, using gs it is possible to print a .pdf into
> another .pdf so that:
> - all not strictly necessary metadata is removed
> - the fonts names are replaces with gibberish
> 
> About the last point, all the fonts are embedded subfonts, so the name
> is not important.
> 
> 
> Your faithfully,
> Paolo
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