This utility is designed to remove anything except visible elements of a PDF, neutralizing anything potentially harmful. It is intended to be run against untrusted PDFs to remove some potential danger.

The untrusted PDF is fed into via stdin. The resulting PDF is outputted via stdout if successful. If an error occurrs, something will be printed to stderr.

Internally, it uses GhostScript, sandboxed in a WASM runtime, to convert the PDF to Postscript format and then back to PDF.

Usage:

npm install -g pdf_neutralize
pdf_neutralize < untrusted.pdf > neutralized.pdf