Adobe’s Advice on Purging PDF Documents of Metadata | Ride The Lightning

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq. of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., recently asked Adobe about metadata in PDF documents in the context of e-discovery. Here is the response she received:

Hi Sharon.

I wanted to leave a quick comment on your 7/13 blog post:
http://ridethelightning.senseient.com/2010/07/metadata-scrubbing-are-lawyers-finally-getting-the-message.html

You are correct that the act of creating a PDF using Adobe Acrobat does not necessarily scrub that document of all metadata. This is because first and foremost, the PDF should be a faithful representation of the original document. If the original document contained text, graphics and layout, the user wants the PDF to contain that same text, graphics and layout. And (usually), if the original document contained information like ?Document Title? or ?Document Keywords?, the user wants the PDF to contain that information (that metadata) as well.

However there are certainly cases where the user does not want the PDF to contain the original document information. For those users, I would recommend they look at two areas of Adobe Acrobat…

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