Can people find orginal author of pdf file?

[Guest]

Can people find orginal author of pdf file? I created pdf file (by printing word doc in pdf format), saved in my home computer, then use free metadata editor to change author/creator of the file, but can people (with computer knowledge) can still find out who the original author was? (if not the name, the computer used or IP address, etc.)? Thanks. 

[try67]

If you've removed this information from the metadata then no, not really. There might be some metadata saved in the file itself (not PDF metadata), though.

[margueritek · Accepted solution]

The Document Information Dictionary (/Info) contains a number of optional entries, which Word probably fills in. Title, Author, Subject, Creator, and others. These can be seen by looking at Document Properties (Ctrl-D in Windows)

[Guest]

What if a document is scanned, that is, after Word to PDF print, then print out a hard copy, then scan that hard copy to create a PDF file? Will they still be able to see that document properties? Thanks.

[margueritek]

No. But the Creator and PDF Producer of the new PDF will probably be related to the name of the scanner software. For instance: I'm using VueScan to scan a file. Creator: "VueScan - www.hamrick.com", PDF Producer: "PoDoFo - http://podofo.sf.net"