Where the name comes from
Word, Pages and most office suites stamp the author field from the user account the software is licensed or signed in to. On a personal machine that’s you. On a work machine it’s often your full legal name, plus a domain.
It’s written once, at authoring time, and then it travels. Exporting to PDF copies it into the Info dictionary. Emailing the file copies the whole file. Nobody sees it in the document, and it’s in every copy.
There’s a second, quieter source: the template. If you started from a document someone else made, their name may be in the field instead of yours, which is the same problem pointing a different way.
Confirm it’s there before you assume anything
Drop the file into the tool and read the overview. It lists every Info field it found, with the value, so the author field is right there rather than something you have to take on faith.
Some files have no Info dictionary at all. A PDF produced by a library rather than an office suite can come out with nothing in it. That’s a real result, not a failed read, and the panel says which case you’re in.
Wipe it, or replace it
Wipe everything removes the Info dictionary as a block and deletes the XMP stream from the catalog. Nothing of the original fields survives, including the production timestamps.
Write specific fields is for when you want the file to carry something particular: a company name, a document title, a reference number for the recipient’s filing system. Fill in what should be there and leave the rest empty, and empty means cleared.
- Author
- Set it to the name that should be on the document, or leave it empty to clear it.
- Title
- Often worth filling in even when wiping everything else, because it’s what a recipient’s file manager shows.
- Subject
- A short description. Useful in a document management system, meaningless otherwise.
- Keywords
- Comma-separated. Rarely read by anything except search tooling.
The field you also have to check
Clearing the author field isn’t the end of it, because the software that produced the file is recorded too, and that’s often identifying. An unusual toolchain narrows a document down to a small set of people or firms, which can be as revealing as a name.
Both fields go together in the wipe. If you’re keeping some fields with rewrite mode, don’t leave Creator and Producer filled in unless you have a reason to.
Check the export rather than trusting it
The result panel reports what was removed and what the structure check found. Then run the exported file back through the same tool. A second read of the new file is the only thing that tells you the field is really gone rather than merely renamed.
It takes a few seconds and it’s the difference between believing the file is clean and knowing it’s.