Themp---Managing Academic Papers like MP3s

Gave up and posted to Usenet

So maybe I should have done this earlier tonight but I put this together and posted to comp.text.pdf. There's lots of FAQs on c-libraries but I couldn't find such a question there before.

From: james@freelancepropaganda.com (James Howison)
Newsgroups: comp.text.pdf
Subject: Edit Document Information Fields via C-library
NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.58.114.130
Message-ID: 

Hi,

I can do this in Perl but can't find an open source C, C++ or ObjC
library that can help me do this inside another programme.

PDFlib doesn't allow the import of existing PDF files (not without PDI
which means that it ain't open source anymore), clibpdf also doesn't
(and at least they say that nicely on their front page).

So is there another pdf library that could help me do this? Or does
someone immediately see that this is very easy and could be done
manually in C?

Basically I want to open an existing PDF and edit the Document
Infomation dictionary object (metadata) or, if there isn't one, add
one.  I'll obviously need to read that as well and then save the pdf
to disk.

I'm banging on about this at
http://shangorilla.syr.edu/themp/

In perl I can do it with the following, but how to do it in C?
----------------------- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use PDF::API2;

$pdf = PDF::API2->open('testcase.pdf');
my %docInfo = $pdf->info;

my $bibtex = q(
        @unpublished{howison03metadata,
                Author = {James Howison and Abby Goodrum},
                Month = {December},
                Title = {Why can't I manage academic papers like MP3s?
The evolution and intent of Metadata standards},
                Url = {http://freelancepropaganda.com/themp/},
                Year = {2003}}
        );

$docInfo{"Keywords"} = $bibtex;  #Stick bibtex entry into Keywords
field

$pdf->info(%docInfo); #add changed hash to pdf
$pdf->saveas("testcaseWithBibtex.pdf"); #save the changed pdf file.

-------------

Any ideas?  And before someone says, "Use XMP to properly store
metadata for PDFs, have a look at this rant about that basically
requiring one to use the Acrobat commercial API here:

http://shangorilla.syr.edu/archives/themp/000203.html

And if I'm wrong about that please let me know ;)

Thanks,
James

Posted by james at October 22, 2003 02:32 AM