Document Metadata
Inspect a document before you send it on. For plain text: byte size, characters, lines, detected encoding, line endings and byte-order mark. For Office and OpenDocument files: the author, last editor, title, timestamps, word and page counts and the application that wrote it. Read in your browser — the file is not uploaded.
Automatic detection uses the byte-order mark when there is one, then checks whether the bytes are valid UTF-8. Override it if a legacy file decodes as nonsense.
Pulls author, timestamps and counts from an Office or OpenDocument file.
Shows the first few lines so you can confirm the encoding was right.
How document metadata works
- Add a fileDrop in a text file or an Office or OpenDocument file. Furtu identifies the container from its own bytes, not from the extension.
- Set the encoding if you need toAutomatic detection is right almost always. Override it for a file exported from a legacy system, then read the preview to confirm.
- Read the reportEvery measurement appears as a labelled chip, with a full plain-text report you can copy or download.
What you get
See what a file says about itself, including what it hides. Everything happens inside this page: the file is read by your browser, transformed in memory and handed straight back to you as a download. There is no upload queue, no waiting for a server, and nothing left behind when you close the tab.
Supported formats
Furtu accepts .txt, .md, .csv, .json, .log, .xml, .yaml, .yml, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .odt files up to 25 MB each — one file at a time.
- Every file is checked against its real file signature, not just its name, so a renamed or corrupt file is rejected with an explanation instead of failing halfway through.
- Files over the limit are refused up front rather than after a long wait.
Limitations, stated up front
- Only the properties defined by the Office and OpenDocument formats are reported. Custom XML metadata parts and embedded revision history are listed as parts but not interpreted.
- Word and page counts come from the values cached when the file was last saved by Word. They are not recomputed, so they can be out of date or absent.
- Encoding detection is a heuristic based on the byte-order mark and UTF-8 validity. Legacy single-byte encodings other than Windows-1252 — Shift-JIS, GBK, ISO-8859-15 — are reported as not-UTF-8 rather than identified exactly.
- For a text file, this reports only the file. It cannot tell you whether a column is text or a date, only how the bytes are arranged.
Why a metadata reader belongs next to the converters
Before you send a contract to the wrong person, it is worth knowing what the file still says about the machine it was authored on. A read-only inspector is the honest first step: it shows the trail without pretending to remove it.
Frequently asked questions
What is this actually telling me?
For a text file, the facts that decide whether it will open correctly somewhere else: how many bytes, characters and lines it has, what encoding it is really in, whether its line endings are LF, CRLF or a mix of both, and whether it starts with a byte-order mark. For an Office or OpenDocument file, the properties the authoring program stored — author, last editor, created, modified, word and page counts, and which program wrote it.
Why does the detected encoding sometimes say UTF-8 when I expected Windows-1252?
Because Windows-1252 text that happens to contain no invalid bytes is also valid UTF-8, and there is no way to tell the two apart from the bytes alone — the difference only shows up in the accented characters, which is exactly what a 1252 file is full of. If the preview looks wrong, override the encoding and compare.
Is this a metadata stripper?
No, it is a reader. Furtu shows you what is stored so you know whether a file still carries a name, a machine name or a company name before you share it. Clearing it is a separate, deliberate act.
Why is my author field empty?
Either the authoring program never wrote one, or it was cleared. Plenty of exporters — including several PDF and Office generators — leave these fields empty on purpose, and an empty field is itself useful information: it means nothing is being leaked.
Is the file I am inspecting uploaded anywhere?
No. Its properties are read from your device, including the document properties inside an office file, and the report is generated in your browser. Useful precisely because you can inspect a file you have been sent without disclosing that you received it.