strip-footers-and-page-numbers

Strip Footers and Page Numbers

Erase footer content (page numbers, dates, document IDs, copyright lines) from every page of a PDF.

Inputs

• Input PDF path (required).
• Footer height (optional) — default 50 pt from the bottom of the page. Adjust if the footer is taller or sits higher.
• Mode (optional):
  • whiteout (default) — paint a white rectangle over the footer area; preserves PDF structure and is fast.
  • text-aware — use pdftotext to identify footer text, then redact only matching text runs. Slower but no white box.
• Output path (optional) — defaults to <input>-no-footer.pdf.

Tooling

• pdftk, qpdf, ghostscript, mutool (mupdf-tools), pdftotext (poppler-utils).
• For overlay-based whiteout: generate a 1-page overlay PDF with a white rectangle at the footer Y-range and stamp it onto every page using pdftk ... background or qpdf --overlay.

Whiteout recipe (qpdf + ImageMagick or Python ReportLab)

1. Probe page size: pdfinfo input.pdf | grep "Page size".
2. Generate a single-page overlay PDF the same size, with a white filled rectangle covering (0, 0) to (pageWidth, footerHeight).
3. Stamp onto every page:

   qpdf input.pdf --overlay overlay.pdf -- output.pdf
   

Verification step

After stamping, render page 1 and the last page to PNG and visually confirm the footer is gone and no body content was clipped:

gs -sDEVICE=png16m -r100 -o /tmp/check-%d.png -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 output.pdf

If text-aware mode: run pdftotext output.pdf - | tail and confirm the page-number/footer line no longer appears.

Caveats

• Whiteout leaves a white band — not a problem on white-paper prints, but visible if the page background is colored.
• Footer height varies — when in doubt, ask the user or render a preview and let them confirm the band height.