Manually add Metadata to PDF

trala-la
Hi there,
First of all, let me congratulate you for the brilliant work you're doing!
Zotero could solve many of my literature problems... once I learn how to use it ;)

I work basically with multiple author documents, scanned magazine articles and ebooks. Everything saved as PDF. Normally, when I add a PDF from my HDD colection to Zotero I can retrieve "some" metadata out of it. Most of the time its either incomplete or just wrong. This is not that bad, cause I always have to correct it or add something. The problem that sometimes the PDF seems not to have metadata what so ever. In this case I get the error: "PDF does not contain OCRed text" and metadata is not available. In other cases, Zotero would look for metadata forever... until I stop the process manually.

Is there a way to be able to force some metadata in a PDF document?

The only way I've found to do this ist to create a new object with metadata and link the PDF as an attachment. Which is not the nicest way.

Thank you very much!
TRala.
  • sean
    The only way I've found to do this ist to create a new object with metadata and link the PDF as an attachment. Which is not the nicest way.
    Creating a parent item and attaching the PDF is the right way to do this.
  • trala-la
    edited July 24, 2009
    Hi sean,
    Thanks for your reply... Even though it was not what I was expecting.

    now... Wha is it that sometimes Zotero "hangs" while trying to retrieve metadata?
    If I have a bunch of PDFs and I try to retrieve the metatags, Zotero gets stuck in the ones with Metadata problems. Isn't there something like time limit?
    How can I avoid the situation?

    cheers

    Trala
  • adamsmith
    edited July 24, 2009
    and no - you can't really force metadata onto a pdf. Zotero looks at the text of the pdf and tries to figure out what it is - if the text is scanned and not machine-readable (i.e. not OCRed) Zotero can't do anything.
    The only way to "force" metadata on this would be to - well, - OCR the text (i.e. use optical character recognition software to transform the scanned text into characters - I think acrobat pro might actually have a function to do that, but not sure), in any case, that doesn't seem like a time saving way in the first place.

    Edit: I don't believe Zotero looks at 'tags' or something along the lines. I don't think those are supported in pdfs, anyway, or are they?
  • mark
    If you have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional, it has a built-in OCR function. I always run that before attaching PDFs in Zotero.
  • trala-la
    THanks for the replies
    I do have Acrobat Pro. Yet, running the OCR recognition doesnt solve the problem.
    I tryed some other docs and fount out that Zotero get the metada fom almost anything. Ist just a few Docs where there is nothing saved.
    TRala
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