#22 Incorrect file create date

[Jim Evans]

gscan2pdf versions 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 save files with incorrect create dates. The create date and time is always the day before the document metadata date at 08:00 EDT (have not determined if this is always a locat time or GMT offset). I am running gscan2pdf v1.8.7 on Linux Mint 18.1 using the jeffreyratcliff ppa for ubuntu xenial.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

Please give me the pdfinfo, stat and ls -l output for one of the PDFs in question.

[Ken Redmon]

gscan2pdf version 2.1.0 also gives files incorrect creation date and time.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

I added an option in Edit/Preferences v2.1.3 to include the timezone and time information to the metadata. This should fix things for you.

[Keith Lindsay]

Jeffrey: thanks very much for developing gscan2pdf - I use it often. I'm using ver 2.1.7 on Ubuntu 18.04. When saving a PDF file, it creates the file with yesterday's date and always a time of 2000. Saving the scanned image as a JPEG, however, yields the correct file creation date/time. I checked the Edit>Preferences for timezone (=locale). Suggestions for a fix?

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

Since v2.1.3, is has been possible to specify the time and/or the timezone. See Edit/Preferences/General Options.

[Jason Currie]

Sorry to revive an old topic, but I'm still having this problem in 2.6.4. I have tried enabling and disabling the preference to use the timezone from my locale. I have tried setting the timezone to Toronto, which is my regular, as well as setting it to New York City in case all possible time zones aren't supported.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

Hi Jason,

Would you be more specific, please.

What are you seeing?

What do you expect to see?

[Jason Currie]

I'm having the exact same problem as the original poster. This has gotten a bit more interesting though. If I create a document today (4 March 2020), the created document will have a created date of 7 pm on 3 march 2020 (which would be midnight on 4 March 2020 UTC) if I look at the created date in Google Drive or in my Desktop environment (Mate/Caja). However, when I view the metadata in Xreader or PDFStudio, it shows midnight on 4 March 2020. So now I'm completely stumped. I've attached the following screenshots:

• Gscan2pdf preferences
• time zone settings from terminal
• mate / caja properties
• XReader properties
• Google Drive properties
• PDFStudio properties
  I've also attached the test pdf file that I created to generate the screenshots.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

The best way to look at the file system and PDF metadata is

stat filename
pdfinfo -isodates filename

replacing filename with your filename.

For your PDF, pdfinfo -isodates gives me:

CreationDate:   2020-03-04T00:00:00-05
ModDate:        2020-03-04T00:00:00-05

which is what I would expect. Obviously, if I stat the file, it'll just give me the download time. What does stat give you?

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

I think I see the problem: The PDF metadata is correct, but the filesystem metadata has the timezone in twice. Is that what you see?

[Jason Currie]

I've attached the output of stat and pdfinfo.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe]

I've fixed this in the next version, which I am just about to release.