Metadata & Scrubbing¶

Setting Metadata¶

doc.set_metadata(
    author="Jane Smith",
    title="Research Paper",
    subject="Computer Science",
)

Metadata Scrubbing¶

Scrubbing replaces all identifying metadata (edit times, revision counts, last modified by, etc.) with clean, realistic values:

doc.set_metadata(author="Jane Smith", scrub=True)

This is useful for:

Academic submissions — Remove edit history before submission
Professional documents — Clean metadata before sharing externally
Privacy — Remove computer name, username, and editing timestamps

What Gets Scrubbed¶

Field	Before	After
Author	`DESKTOP-ABC123\admin`	`Jane Smith`
Last Modified By	`admin`	`Jane Smith`
Created	`2026-06-10 03:42:17`	Realistic date
Modified	`2026-06-15 21:11:30`	Realistic date
Revision	`47`	`2` or `3`
Total Edit Time	`PT847M`	Realistic duration
Application	`Microsoft Office Word`	`Microsoft Office Word`

Reading Metadata¶

meta = doc.metadata
print(meta.author)
print(meta.title)
print(meta.to_dict())

CLI Scrubbing¶

papersmith scrub document.docx --author "Public Author"

# Save to a different file
papersmith scrub document.docx --author "Public Author" --output clean.docx