Xara Photo and Graphic 18, PDF creation with all identifying information removed?

Hi,

What is the best way to create a Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 18, PDF document, with all traceable and identifying creation information removed from the document?

In other words a clean, generic PDF document!

This is for personal security reasons!

Cheers Elixer

well going to the pdf export options > document tab, and unticking 'include document information' is a good start, as is exporting it to the root of a non system drive so your windows username path is not in the pdf document properties either

that's as far as I usually go, but there may be more to do

I don't really have the need in PDF; in MS Office on the other hand....

Thanks Handrawn for two useful tips.

Export to an external hard drive is not a bad idea!

I do not believe you can remove things like the Producer information, version, etc from within Xara.
You will need another application - Web Search: remove pdf producer info.

Acorn

you can use adobe reader DC to redact - but you only get 7 days free

first link to hand:

https://www.siam.org/publications/jo...al-information

adobe reader itself is free; acrobat is not

Yes Acorn, I suspect that the Xara information will still be retained.

And handrawn, I tried the seven day free Adobe reader DC but I have used my trial up, before I reedited my final version! Idiot!

It is expensive software for what I want to do! I might have to find a professional office which has the software, but even then, will it remove the Xara information??

A good search choice Acorn

There are a few options, some with free 7 day, and cheaper than Adobe Reader DC.



https://pdf.wondershare.com/how-to/r...-from-pdf.html

https://pdf.wondershare.com/pdfelement.html

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/remove-metadata-file/

As PDF was intended as an extension of PostScript it used to be an ASCII-text based file. And sometimes it still is (when there's no need to compress)

So, you might try to open it in a good editor. While checking the opacity possibilities of Xara (as mentione in Acorn's post https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...-Stretched-Box) I exported a file to PDF. If I open that file in Notepad and scroll down to the last sections I can see:

"
5 0 obj
<</Creator( \(Xara.com\))/Producer( \(Xara.com\) PDF export 9,5,0,19)>>
endobj
xref
0 6
0000000000 65535 f
0000004725 00000 n
0000004777 00000 n
0000004835 00000 n
0000004875 00000 n
0000004926 00000 n
trailer
<</Size 6>>
startxref
120
%%EOF
"

One can happily delete this last object or delete the information one seems to find necessary . But be aware that you might break some structures in the file. So back up before editing...

Oh, and don't use Notepad. It's not the best pure text editor. Better use a freeware hex-editor of your liking

this is a good idea in principle, but only if you know what you are doing, especially with a hex editor; like editing windows registry if you don't know what you are looking for and where it is exactly you can screw up the file, as you rightly point out