Bsrgvty

I need a command line tool for editing metadata of pdf-files.

I'm using a Aiptek MyNote Premium tablet for writing my notes and minutes on this device, import them later and convert them to pdf automatically with a simple script using inkscape and ghostscript.

Is there any command line tool to add some categories to the pdf's metadata, so i can find the pdf later (e.g. with gnome-do) by categories?

Update: I tried the solution with pdftk and it works, but it seems that gnome-do doesn't take care of pdf-metadata. Is there a way to get gnome-do to do that?

Give exiftool a try, it is available from the package libimage-exiftool-perl in the repositories.

As an example, If you have a pdf file called drawing.pdf and you want to update its metadata, Use the utility, exiftool, in this way:

exiftool -Title="This is the Title" -Author="Happy Man" -Subject="PDF Metadata" drawing.pdf

For some reason the Subject entered ends up in the keywords field of the metadata in the pdf file. not a problem in some cases, even desirable, however, this may be problematic, evince and the nautilus metadata previewer do not show this but Adobe Acrobat viewer and PDF-XChange viewer does.

The program will create a backup of the original file if you do not use the; -overwrite_original switch, this means a duplicate will exist in the folder where the updated pdf is. From example above; a file named ; drawing.pdf_original will be created.

use the overwrite switch at your own risk, my suggestion is not to use it and script something to move this file to a better location just in case.

You can edit metadata by using pdftk. Check out update_info parameter. As for data file, below is an example:

InfoKey: Title
InfoValue: Mt-Djing: multitouch DJ table
InfoKey: Subject
InfoValue: Dissertation for Master degree
InfoKey: Keywords
InfoValue: DJing, NUI, multitouch, user-centered design
InfoKey: Author
InfoValue: Pedro Lopes

(Source)

Using Ghostview

Create a file named “pdfmarks” with this content:

[ /Title (Document title)
 /Author (Author name)
 /Subject (Subject description)
 /Keywords (comma, separated, keywords)
 /ModDate (D:20061204092842)
 /CreationDate (D:20061204092842)
 /Creator (application name or creator note)
 /Producer (PDF producer name or note)
 /DOCINFO pdfmark

then combine this pdfmarks file with a PDF, PS or EPS input file:

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf no_marks.pdf pdfmarks

Source: http://milan.kupcevic.net/ghostscript-ps-pdf/

To elaborate on the pdftk method, which is nice because it shows you everything that's being set, at the same time as allowing you to change anything you like, here is a script (for your .bashrc or other aliases file) to do it with one command. This creates a new version of the file you want to edit, opens your favourite editor with the metadatafile, and then implements your changes and sets the file creation/modification time on the modified PDF file to be the same as the original. To use it, after resourcing your .bashrc file, just type

editPDFmetadata myfile.pdf

Here's the alias:

editPDFmetadata() 
OUTPUT="$1-new.pdf"
METADATA="tmp$1-report.txt"
pdftk $1 dump_data output $METADATA
$EDITOR $METADATA
pdftk $1 update_info $METADATA output $OUTPUT
touch -r $1 $OUTPUT

Simply place the definition above into the .bashrc file in your home folder, then open a new terminal and it will be ready to use.