Adding metadata to PDF properties

geobt · January 12, 2021

Hi all, I'm a new Zotero user and I want to take the Zotero metadata and add it to the PDF properties i.e. hard wire it into the document. Is there:
1) a Zotero feature to add metadata as PDF properties
2 an export format within Zotero that I can import into Adobe later i.e. XMP?
Thanks

adamsmith · January 12, 2021

No on the first.
Jabref can do this -- I looked at this briefly and the only open PDF library with easy access to writing to the XMP properties is written in Java, so would be no small feat for Zotero (Jabref is written in Java, so fairly trivial for them).

On 2, Zotero exports unqualified DC, which is valid as part of XMP, so you can take a barebone XMP template and paste in the dc: properties in the Zotero export. With some light scripting, you'd also be able to turn the existing DC export into an XMP one.

qqbb · January 12, 2021

I want to take the Zotero metadata and add it to the PDF properties

There's a new tool that writes some Zotero data into PDF files:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86578/a-new-tool-to-write-zotero-select-links-into-pdf-files

It uses a Python library for reading and writing PDFs. You could contact the developer, who might be interested in your use case.

For a JavaScript solution, this library could be interesting:
https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib

Jabref can do this

It seems that Jabref is using Apache PDFBox.

Given dstillman's comment here, a future Zotero version might use Apache Lucene/Solr for improved search functions. That's also a Java tool. Maybe it's worth looking into using PDFBox in the future as well? It could help making extracted annotations virtual, once Zotero integrates an annotation extraction function similar to what ZotFile currently offers. However, if I understand the comment correctly, such options would have to wait until after Zotero switches to Electron.