[toolbox] PDF files and metadata

[Adam R. M. <ama...@ma...>]

I've been playing around with PDF metadata support in BibDesk,  
presently implemented as hidden features in the nightly builds.  The  
basic idea is that the PDF file has either full BibTeX associated  
with it as an extended attribute, or else has the standard Author/ 
Title/Date/Keywords metadata supported by PDFDocument and Spotlight.   
With that support, dropping a PDF file on BibDesk fills in much of  
the needed citation information for you.

So far, so good.  Unfortunately, Mac OS X xattrs aren't supported on  
other platforms, and setting the PDF attributes via PDFDocument (and  
then saving the PDFDocument) is /really/ slow, as it needs to re- 
render the PDF.

Question:
Does anyone know of a better way to do this?  I looked at Adobe's XMP  
library, but I don't grok C++, and it seems really low-level in any  
case.

Suggestion:
It might be nice if the TeX front ends that use PDFDocument could  
write some of that metadata into the file, either by parsing it or  
providing an interface to edit the metadata.

thanks,
Adam (wondering if the list still works...)