PDF metadata

[khbkhb]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Power PC

I'd like to have Title, Author, Subject and Keywords set in the generated
pdf. However, in my preliminary experiments with Word 2008 for the Mac; save
as pdf works fine in that a pair of PDF files is generated. The first one has
the document text, but not the desired metadata. The second one has
information about the first pdf ... including the desired metadata (but not
AS metadata, simply as text in the body of the document).

FWIW, OpenOffice behaves as expected (as does FrameMaker)

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Can you clarify a bit? You are talking about the Title, Author, Subject,
and Keywords as you've set them in File | Properties, I assume? Exactly
what metadata do you want them to show up in? How would you access that
metadata?

Where did these *two* pdf files come from? I'm not following what you did.

 

[khbkhb]

On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:57 AM, Daiya Mitchell wrote:

Can you clarify a bit? You are talking about the Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords as you've set them in File | Properties, I assume? Exactly what metadata do you want them to show up in? How would you access that metadata?

Sorry, I thought the terminology was standard. The PDF metadata is what's described in the Adobe documents (and ISO) which define PDF. In Acrobat, you access this metadata via (on a mac cloverleaf D) File->Properties. Also it can be accessed via CLI tools like pdftk

Where did these *two* pdf files come from? I'm not following what you did.

In word, I set the word document properties (which coincidentally have the same names as the adobe definitions), title, subject, keywords, and then did a save as PDF. No dialog controlling the PDF generation appeared other than the file name to be generated. Two files were created, foo.pdf foo.1.pdf (or a -1, I forget offhand). The former was the expected PDF, other than the metadata wasn't propagated from the word document (title was a munged version of the filename, rather than the title I'd selected). The latter was a "report" about the generated PDF.

Other authoring tools that generate PDF are typically kind enough to provide some optional control over the output (such as whether bookmarks are to be generated (say from chapter title styles), exposed as externalized targets, and possibly control over what gets put into the PDF file as PDF metadata.

 

[CyberTaz]

The second PDF is being generated because you have Document Properties
checked in Word's Print Preferences. Clear the check if you don't want the
2nd PDF. The Properties you want *are* included in the 1st PDF & can be
examined via the File> Properties command in Acrobat as you describe. The
metadata is embedded in the primary PDF either way.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[khbkhb]

Sadly, the metadata in the generated file is both wrong and incomplete. The title isn't the title I assigned (it's been munged to have additional annotation about microsoft word), and the subject and keywords where were set in the word document properties remain blank in the generated pdf. Testing with word2004 (my other computer isn't handy) produces the same deranged result, with the additional (at least from memory) bit of damage that Author is set to "System Administrator" rather than the Author I'd set in the Document properties.

Nice tip about the extra report though.