Re: [toolbox] PDF files and metadata

[Maarten S. <maa...@xs...>]

On 19 Feb 2006, at 1:06, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:

> 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.

It is. But if you can generate the xml describing the metadata,  
adding it to a pdftex generated file is trivial, and I think it isn't  
too hard either adding the blob to other files as well. The hardest  
part is recreating the pointer table at the end of the pdf file, but  
I think you can script this using pdftk as an engine.

> 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.

May I suggest xmpincl? You'll need to generate a separate xmp file  
yourself, but after that, including it is easy.
     http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/xmpincl/
In any case, a pdfTeX based solution is both portable, and probably  
faster anyway. However, I can see that especially for BibDesk, adding  
the metadata to an existing file is essential. May I also suggest you  
get in contact with Bruce d'Arcus, as he seems to be working on  
introducing a standard for this: http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/ 
darcusb/darcusb/

Maarten