Can metadata be written to a pdf without conversion?

[PatNY]

I vaguely recall seeing in the What's New notes for Calibre some sort of new feature for writing metadata to a pdf? I think it was within the last 6 months or so, but am not sure.

Can this be done without a conversion? How? I've poked around in the menus and the settings but couldn't find anything relating to this.

I am most interested in having the Title and the Series picked up by the pdf.

Hopefully this recollection is not just my imagination or faulty memory at work!

--Pat

[tsolignani]

I guess it works only when you save to disk. And it's a pity...

[BetterRed]

The feature you're looking for is Embed Metadata, you'll probably need to add it to a toolbar/menu via Preferences->Toolbars.

It was implemented in 1.41 ==>> calibre - What's new

BR

[PatNY]

Thanks, BetterRed. That's exactly what I need. I was on 1.40 so I hadn't yet seen that option.

The feature I actually saw awhile back was added to version 1.25, but in looking back, that appears to be just something for XMP metadata that is done during conversion.

So I installed 1.48, tested the embed feature and it works pretty well. However there are some instances (maybe 1 in 7) where it won't write to a pdf. I get error messages like this:

The PDF format of Tastes of Italia - 2010-12:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\customize\ui.py", line 363, in set_file_type_metadata
File "site-packages\calibre\customize\builtins.py", line 502, in set_metadata
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\pdf.py", line 160, in set_metadata
File "site-packages\calibre\utils\podofo\__init__.py", line 41, in set_metadata
Exception: Failed to set PDF metadata: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\utils\ipc\simple_worker.py", line 274, in main
File "site-packages\calibre\utils\podofo\__init__.py", line 57, in set_metadata_
Error: ePdfError_InvalidDataType

Does anyone know what this means and can it be fixed?

--Pat

[kovidgoyal]

Open a bug report and attach a pdf file that fails

[PatNY]

Thanks, Kovid. I just opened up a bug report.

--Pat

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Thanks, BetterRed. That's exactly what I need. I was on 1.40 so I hadn't yet seen that option.

The feature I actually saw awhile back was added to version 1.25, but in looking back, that appears to be just something for XMP metadata that is done during conversion.

So I installed 1.48, tested the embed feature and it works pretty well. However there are some instances (maybe 1 in 7) where it won't write to a pdf. I get error messages like this:



Does anyone know what this means and can it be fixed?

--Pat

@PatNY - workaround - when that happens, ~15% of books, and if I care about it, I clear existing metadata with exiftool and try re-doing the Embed, works for ~80% of the 15%. The X% are guesses based on small sample size.

BR