Pdf, calibre and metadata

[Richs]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

Then why do it? At this point I'm unsure if you are talking about only PDF files or all files.



The Send to device feature embeds the same metadata in a book that the Save to disk feature does.

A few questions:

1) Has a solution for embedding the metadata into the PDFs within the Calibre library been made available?

2) Is it just me, or is Dr. Ohh rude?

It makes sense to bring up this topic because implementing a "write tags to PDF [at your own peril]" tool seems like it would be trivially easy for Kovid to do.

3) Is the fear/hesitation that such a process might, under some special circumstance, damage a PDF? Or is there some more obvious reason that this simple and sought after feature is not available?

[DoctorOhh]

Moderator Notice
Moved post to its own thread. The previous thread started in April 2009 and was over 16 months since it was last referenced.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Richs

1) Has a solution for embedding the metadata into the PDFs within the Calibre library been made available?

No.

Originally Posted by Richs

2) Is it just me, or is Dr. Ohh rude?

Possibly.

Originally Posted by Richs

It makes sense to bring up this topic because implementing a "write tags to PDF [at your own peril]" tool seems like it would be trivially easy for Kovid to do.

Kovid has his priorities and this feature has not made it to the top yet.

[Richs]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

No.



Possibly.



Kovid has his priorities and this feature has not made it to the top yet.

Although I was hoping for a different answer, thank you for your speedy reply!!! You are certainly an asset to everyone, from us new users to Kovid, I'm sure your help is broadly appreciated.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by Richs

...
2) Is it just me, or is Dr. Ohh rude? ...

DoctorOhh has a dry and subtle sense of humor, sometimes obscured by skilled targeting and judicious use of brevity bullets.

Some people unused to that type of directness and brevity may interpret it as rudeness. Which I conclude is their problem, not DoctorOhh's problem.

[NillaGoon]

I seem to have blundered into this discussion in the middle, but (lack of) PDF metadata editing is a peeve of mine as well. I would love to be able to fix the Title and Author fields within the PDF metadata from Calibre, since this is what most readers seem to pay attention to.

[BetterRed]

Maybe it could be done with a PI that invokes ExifTool e.g.

exiftool -Title=”Some Title” -Author=”An Author & Another One” input.pdf

Exiftool is a command line program, runs on Linux, Mac & Windows, written in Perl. Below are the main metadata items Exiftool can write to a PDF, the relevant webpage is here.

'Author'
'CreationDate'
'Creator'
'Keywords'
'ModDate'
'Producer'
'Subject'
'Title'

Good place to start for an apprentice PI-Writer - Polish PDF

BR

[cybmole]

surely low priority because
1. very few users would want to convert TO pdf via calibre.

2. Most PDFs which have been added to calibre purely for library management will be "secured" by their authors i.e. no changes allowed, even to metadata.

3. "secured" can be removed but Kovid does not do that stuff for obvious legal reasons, & we don't discuss i"how to " here, except very obscurely.

[itimpi]

Calibre itself has very limited functionality for editing PDF metadata and I do not believe that Kovid has much interest in improving this situation.

If you have a tool that can edit PDF metadata then it can always be used in conjunction with the Calibre "Open With" plugin. That at least provides a level of integration into the Calibre GUI.

[DoctorOhh]

Calibre does update the metadata (title, author, keywords) in a pdf when it is sent to the device or saved to disk

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

Calibre does update the metadata (title, author, keywords) in a pdf when it is sent to the device or saved to disk

what happens then, if the PDF is secured.
is there an error message or just no action taken.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by cybmole

what happens then, if the PDF is secured.
is there an error message or just no action taken.

But even when a PDF is unsecured, the metadata is not always updated in Save to Disk (rarely in my experience), never figured out why - I update it manually with exiftool and/or pdfXChange and move on

BR

[NillaGoon]

Originally Posted by cybmole

surely low priority because
2. Most PDFs which have been added to calibre purely for library management will be "secured" by their authors i.e. no changes allowed, even to metadata

3. "secured" can be removed but Kovid does not do that stuff for obvious legal reasons, & we don't discuss i"how to " here, except very obscurely.

Although some commercial books may be locked, the vast majority of PDF files in my Calibre library come from other sources and are unprotected.

For example, virtually 100% of documentation out in the world is in PDF format. Every electronic component data sheet, every software library manual, every court opinion, every white paper - they're all distributed as unprotected PDF files. And very rarely do those PDF files have correct metadata.

It's too bad, because those are exactly the files you're most likely to need to search for; they usually don't have visually distinctive covers. If you can't search by title, you're significantly handicapped.

Originally Posted by cybmole

1. very few users would want to convert TO pdf via calibre.

Even if that were true, why is it relevant? I have a lot of book-length PDF files in my world, and I would like to manage them as part of my Calibre library. It doesn't have anything to do with format conversion.

It seems strange to me that Calibre adjusts PDF metadata during some exports (e.g., Save to Disk) but not others (e.g., drag to iBooks). And given that Calibre is already capable of metadata adjustments, it's even stranger that it doesn't automatically synchronize the Calibre and PDF metadata whenever you edit metadata.

Is there a scenario in which this is not the behavior you'd want?

[cybmole]

are you sure about "unprotected",

in my own experience , mostly I download a spec sheet, user manual, form to fill in, it is "secured", I use PDF exchange & get a visual confirmation of ( SECURED) on the title line.
As a quick test I just opened two specs/guides that I have to hand from Yamaha & Sony - both are secured.

don't confuse secured ( can't edit) with password protected ( password needed to open ) - they are different features

Some at least of the "it doesn't work" reports will trace back to calibre giving up, without an error message, if asked to edit a secured document

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by NillaGoon

And given that Calibre is already capable of metadata adjustments, it's even stranger that it doesn't automatically synchronize the Calibre and PDF metadata whenever you edit metadata.

Is there a scenario in which this is not the behavior you'd want?

Calibre doesn't automatically update the metadata in any format within its library. The metadata in calibre is stored in the database (metadata.db).