I got a Sony E-Reader as a Christmas present from my parents this year. I absolutely love it! It will definitely change how I read books. I no longer have to lug around several books everywhere I go. The best part is that I can put all my journal articles in it. I no longer have to print off hundreds of pages of journal articles. However, there is one thing that I have found really annoying. It is practically impossible to find programs that change the pdf’s metadata. It took me awhile to find one that actually worked.
I ended up finding a Linux Program called PDFTK. I wanted to go over some basic commands (mainly so that I can find them easily).
Installing PDFTK:
sudo apt-get install pdftk
Edit Existing Meta-Data:
pdftk book.pdf dump_data output report.txt
You can then edit the data in report.txt which we can later upload back to the pdf. The text file will contain key value pairs like:
InfoKey: Title InfoValue: Coders At Work InfoKey: Author InfoValue: Peter Seivel InfoKey: Subject InfoValue: Programming
After you edit this file, you can update the new meta-data to the pdf.
Update PDF Meta-Data:
pdftk book.pdf update_info report.txt output bookcopy.pdf
Comment by Koko
Made Wednesday, 23 of June , 2010 at 12:46 pm
This is great but a bit cumbersome when editing a lot of metadata. I know Calibre can do that with a GUI but I couldn’t warm up to Calibre. So what else can one use?