avoid hidden information

[Ellen Marie]

Hello - I'm submitting this question again.  I mistakenly marked it as correct in my previous post.  We'd like to not get PDFs with hidden information.  Is there something we can tell our submitters so they don't give us PDFs with hidden information?  I have Acrobat XI. thanks in advance.

[Cari Jansen]

What type of hidden information are you referring to?  E.g. something like Metadata, e.g. Title, Author is a requirement for Accessibility purposes.

It could be helpful to make a checklist for people submitting PDFs to you, they could refer to the checklist of things that are OK or not OK to submit as part of PDF submission.

Have you looked at using the build-in redaction feature in Acrobat to remove hidden information?

See: Removing sensitive content from PDFs in Adobe Acrobat DC

[Ellen Marie]

Hi Cari,

I'd like to be able to remove hidden information w/o removing any visible information.  When I attempt the built-in feature to remove hidden information, it'll often tell me that other information such as digital signatures can be removed.  I'm posting PDFs that others have authored and can't take the risk of removing anything that should be there.

Thanks for your response,

Ellen

[Test Screen Name]

I think you need to fully understand what you mean by "hidden information" and why you want it removed. What is the issue you are trying to solve? Digital signatures are hidden, so consider why you don't want to remove them, for example? Are you sure other "hidden" information isn't important?

[Ellen Marie]

Hello,

I am posting PDFs from a 3rd party to the web.  I don't have access to their original documents, nor can I contact them.  The PDF that is posted to the web must be the same as what we received.  There can't be any information added or deleted.

Thanks for responding. 🙂

[Ellen Marie]

Everything was fine until we were required to remediate the PDFs for 508 compliance.  When that is done, sometimes weird characters manifest w/o warning.  That's the reason to want hidden information gone w/o messing w/ the content.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

[gkaiseril]

In the process of removing hidden information when using Acrobat, you can see the information that will be removed in the right hand panel and you have the option to deselect specific items so that those items will not be removed by the process. You nay need to expand some collapsed categories or objects.

[Test Screen Name]

If you must post what you received, I don't understand why you would remove any information, hidden or not? Or even why it would be allowed given that it must be the same... Sorry, I still don't understand your motivation or what you mean by "hidden". I'm sure it's important. Perhaps you could tell us the sort of problem you're trying to avoid?

[Ellen Marie]

Hello Test Screen Name - when I remediate the PDFs for 508 compliance, sometimes weird characters manifest - which I believe is a consequence of the hidden information.  If I didn't have to remediate, yes, you're right - the hidden information would not be a problem.

[Test Screen Name]

I think you might be jumping to big conclusions. You should also bear in mind (this thought had just occurred to me) that accessibility information and tags in a PDF are hidden. Hence if you just delete hidden information you will REMOVE all the hard work (if any) put into 508 compliance.

I suggest you take a step back to looking at the specific problem with weird characters, and not assume it's down to hidden information. It's more likely a font encoding issue, not hidden at all. Please describe your issue in detail, with screen shots if possible. Please do NOT try to email screen shots though, doesn't work!

[Ellen Marie]

Hi Test Screen Name - I've been unable to reproduce the stray characters, but here's an error message I got with one that gave me trouble.  I assumed that the hidden information was the culprit, but maybe it's font encoding.  Is there a way to fix it?

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

Well, it sounds as if it considers the font damaged/invalid. Higher standards apply to accessible (508) PDFs than ordinary PDFs. It definitely isn't hidden, the fonts are part of the visible page. This isn't an error I've seen before - has anyone else seen it or found a work around? I suspect we may need to start this now as a new topic in a different forum to catch the eye of the right experts.

[Ellen Marie]

thanks so much Test Screen Name.  OK.  I'll start a new topic.