Changing a PDF author programmatically

Question

In my office we have about 1000 PDFs that have arbitrary title and author information. My bosses had a spreadsheet created with the PDFs filename and an appropriate title and appropriate author information.

I would like to find a programmatic way to move the data from the Excel sheet to the PDF attributes?

My preferred language is Python so I looked for a Python library to do this, each library I looked at had the author and title fields as read-only.

If Python doesn't have a library that works I am okay using VBA, VB.NET, JavaScript... I will take this as an opportunity to learn a new language.

Some good answers over at http://askubuntu.com/questions/27381/how-to-edit-pdf-metadata-from-command-line for doing it with CLI tools. — Sean McSomething, Jan 03 '13 at 18:12
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4100405/writing-metadata-to-a-pdf-using-pyobjc — Alex W, Jan 03 '13 at 18:19

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 03 '13 at 18:16

2

If you want to learn java you can use the Apache PDFBox

Here is an implementation example.

answered Jan 03 '13 at 18:16

Helio Santos

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STTR · Answer 2 · 2013-01-03T18:39:03.377

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Use Action Wizard in Acrobat X Pro.

Create New Action.

Setup Start With, and Save To step.

Set checkbox Overwrite existing files.

Select Content. Select Add Document Description.

Left mouse click in option. Uncheck Autor checkbox Leave As Is and enter new Autor name.

Press Save button, set name action Your Action Name.

Run Action:

File- Action Wizard - Your Action Name.

I test it - work).

edited Jan 03 '13 at 18:39

answered Jan 03 '13 at 18:20

STTR

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Please note the word "programmatically" in the question. Manual steps using Acrobat X Pro aren't relevant ... this should be deleted. – Jim Balter Jul 22 '19 at 05:32
@JimBalter In the question of the author, the task is considered not of a programmer, but rather of a system administrator. Such tasks are solved as quickly as possible in any way. Perhaps you want to complicate `this.info.author = ` But why?) This question is for the `superuser`. Javascript will be formally executed. – STTR Jul 23 '19 at 09:03
" the task is considered not of a programmer, but rather of a system administrator" -- No, again, it says "programmatically". Every word of the title, the question, the comments under the question, and the accepted answer are about programming. And no, this is not a question for the superuser -- there's a StackExchange for that, but this is StackOverflow, which is devoted to programming. – Jim Balter Jul 23 '19 at 19:14

Changing a PDF author programmatically

2 Answers2