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Originally Posted by paulzag
The other reason I want to update the PDF's is I use google desktop search more and more.
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Calibre tries not to "change" a user's book unless he clearly wants it. That's why the default is to save the book without change, and store metadata only in the db. If you want Google desktop search to access Calibre's copy of your books, you're going to have to update the metadata in the pdf.
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Converting PDF->PDF seems a slow and inefficient way of updating the metadata.
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PDF sucks. According to Kovid, that's how the 3rd party tools work to change metadata, and it's not something that's in Calibre's control to do differently.
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I get that calibre is like iTunes for ebooks, but in iTunes I can save id3 tags back to the underlying files. Should the database ever get corrupted, I lose some of my data, but not the core tags.
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You can read this discussion elsewhere here, but the bottom line is that ebooks are not like mp3s and metadata for ebooks is not like id3 tags. It's not possible to save most metadata in most ebook formats. Trying to write multiple types of metadata into different and inconsistent ebook formats is not at all like trying to write id3 tags into the mp3 format specifically designed to receive those tags.
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Am I trying to force calibre to be something it's not?
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Perhaps. It's up to you to decide. PDF format seems of particular interest to you, and of all ebook formats, it's the worst. It's not even a format, it's a container. Some things inside the container (like Portfolio PDFs and images of pages) aren't readable at all by Calibre.
It's also the one format that Calibre has the least control over when creating it or modifying it to add/change metadata. Calibre relies entirely on 3rd party tools for those functions and if those tools don't work, you have to go elsewhere to get the problem fixed. The main focus of Calibre when it comes to PDF is how the heck to read the $%^&* format cleanly to convert to something more ebook friendly.