Is the title removed?

Document info and XMP are cleared. If you need a title to remain, say so in the download name — do not rely on the PDF’s Author or Title fields after a strip.

Can I recover the old metadata after a clean?

Not from the cleaned file, if the rebuild finished. That is the point of the structural pass. We cannot speak to copies you still have, or to a remote C2PA registry.

Does this affect the look of the pages?

The strip targets metadata and unused objects, not the drawing of the page. If a job would have to guess, it fails and the credit is refunded.

PDF · XMP · C2PA

A PDF can remember who wrote it after the words have changed.

A PDF keeps an info dictionary and often an XMP packet: author, creator software, dates, and sometimes a C2PA Content Credential. Deleting those keys in place is not enough — leftover objects stay in the bytes. Gifi clears the fields and rebuilds the file so the old metadata is not sitting in an unused stream.

Where a PDF hides its history

The document info dictionary is the obvious place: Title, Author, Creator, Producer, CreationDate, ModDate. Many files also carry an XMP stream attached to the catalogue, which repeats the same facts in XML and can hold a C2PA manifest.

PDFs are a pile of objects with a trailer. If you only rewrite the dictionary and leave the old object in the file, a determined reader can still recover it. That is why a serious strip has to rebuild the structure, not just edit a field.

Why this job leaves the browser

PNG, JPEG, WebP, DOCX and ODT can be cleaned with byte or ZIP surgery in-process. A trustworthy PDF strip needs a tool that can linearize and drop unused objects. Gifi sends PDFs to a worker that can do that. One credit, same as any other file.

A format we cannot fully clean is refused. A PDF you believe is clean, but is not, is worse than one we declined.

What this does not do

It does not rewrite the sentences on the page. Invisible Unicode in the text layer of a PDF is a different problem from the info dictionary. It does not remove a watermark printed into the appearance of the page. And if a C2PA soft-binding fingerprint was taken, a remote manifest can still re-attach.

Questions this usually raises

Is the title removed?: Document info and XMP are cleared. If you need a title to remain, say so in the download name — do not rely on the PDF’s Author or Title fields after a strip.
Can I recover the old metadata after a clean?: Not from the cleaned file, if the rebuild finished. That is the point of the structural pass. We cannot speak to copies you still have, or to a remote C2PA registry.
Does this affect the look of the pages?: The strip targets metadata and unused objects, not the drawing of the page. If a job would have to guess, it fails and the credit is refunded.