How to edit pdf metadata from command line?

Question

I need a command line tool for editing metadata of pdf-files.

I'm using a Aiptek MyNote Premium tablet for writing my notes and minutes on this device, import them later and convert them to pdf automatically with a simple script using inkscape and ghostscript.

Is there any command line tool to add some categories to the pdf's metadata, so i can find the pdf later (e.g. with gnome-do) by categories?

Update: I tried the solution with pdftk and it works, but it seems that gnome-do doesn't take care of pdf-metadata. Is there a way to get gnome-do to do that?

Answer 1

Give exiftool a try, it is available from the package libimage-exiftool-perl in the repositories.

As an example, If you have a pdf file called drawing.pdf and you want to update its metadata, Use the utility, exiftool, in this way:

exiftool -Title="This is the Title" -Author="Happy Man" -Subject="PDF Metadata" drawing.pdf

For some reason the Subject entered ends up in the keywords field of the metadata in the pdf file. not a problem in some cases, even desirable, however, this may be problematic, evince and the nautilus metadata previewer do not show this but Adobe Acrobat viewer and PDF-XChange viewer does.

The program will create a backup of the original file if you do not use the; -overwrite_original switch, this means a duplicate will exist in the folder where the updated pdf is. From example above; a file named ; drawing.pdf_original will be created.

use the overwrite switch at your own risk, my suggestion is not to use it and script something to move this file to a better location just in case.

Answer 2

You can edit metadata by using pdftk. Check out update_info parameter. As for data file, below is an example:

InfoKey: Title
InfoValue: Mt-Djing: multitouch DJ table
InfoKey: Subject
InfoValue: Dissertation for Master degree
InfoKey: Keywords
InfoValue: DJing, NUI, multitouch, user-centered design
InfoKey: Author
InfoValue: Pedro Lopes

(Source)

Answer 3

There's also pyPdf, but I haven't been able to find something like qmv for this matter. I'd like to see a batch mode metadata editor. Has anyone designed anything like qmv but for PDF metadata?