remove personal information in pages

In Pages Preferences : General, I use an Author name of Anonymous, which is also used in Highlights and Comments for document tracking. Only the Pages application can open Pages documents, so there is no external "editing" approach to removing personal information.

I have exported to PDF, and to Word .docx, and in either of these formats, I have not found a reference to my personal name, or even Anonymous, especially in the multiple internal .xml documents contained within the Word file.

It sounds to me as though you were expected to be transcribing in Word, and that may have saved you considerable time, if known document sanitation features available for Word — were to be applied.

Not exactly. This morning, I created another very simple one-liner Pages document where one word had a comment associated with it, and that comment as before, used the Author name (e.g. Anonymous) from the Pages Preferences : General panel.

I exported this to Word .docx, and since I do not have MS Office, I opened that document in LibreOffice (7.0.4.2) Writer. Here is how the comment appeared:

Notice that this time, the Author name made its way into the Word document's comment, and in particular, the word/comments.xml location within the Word documents zip container. Word documents are comprised of certain structure, and fundamental content that may add or omit other content as it is detected in the document content. In this case, the Pages export encountered a comment, and the internal comment.xml file was added to the Word document. It is this stuff that will bite you when when you least expect it.

I am not an authority on MS Word, its possible dynamic internal document architecture, nor the enigma of the Pages export process — and cannot possibly know every nuance of how personal information (e.g. author name) can be transmitted on to the Word document. I do know that if one changes the Pages Author name, that it will automatically change that Author name in every comment in that Pages document. That in its own right is can be a huge time saver. Then you need to check for personal name usage in the Pages document corpus.