Apache PDFBox adding meta-data to PDF document

We can change the document properties of a PDF document like: creator, author, title, subject, creationDate, etc. In this tutorial we demonstrate how to add meta-data to a PDF document using Apache PDFBox. PDFBox supports different formats and schemes like XMP. The first example adds meta-data to a PDF document. The second example reads the meta-data from a PDF document.

Maven Dependencies

We use Apache Maven to manage our project dependencies. Make sure the following dependencies reside on the class-path.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.8</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>xmpbox</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.8</version>
</dependency>

Adding Meta-data to PDF Document

We can change and add PDF document properties using the PDDocumentInformation class. This allows us to set properties like:

• title – will set the title of the document.
• subject – will set the subject of the document.
• author – will set the author of the document.
• creator – will set the creator of the document.
• producer – will set the producer of the document.
• keywords – will set the keywords of the document.
• creationDate – will set the creation date of the document.
• modificationDate – will set the modification date of the document.
• trapped – will set the trapped of the document. This will be True, False, or Unkown
• customMetadataValue – set the custom metadata value.

package com.memorynotfound.pdf.pdfbox;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentCatalog;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentInformation;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDPage;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.common.PDMetadata;
import org.apache.xmpbox.XMPMetadata;
import org.apache.xmpbox.schema.AdobePDFSchema;
import org.apache.xmpbox.schema.DublinCoreSchema;
import org.apache.xmpbox.schema.XMPBasicSchema;
import org.apache.xmpbox.xml.XmpSerializer;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Calendar;

public class AddMetaData {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{

        try (final PDDocument document = new PDDocument()){

            PDDocumentInformation info = new PDDocumentInformation();
            info.setTitle("Apache PDFBox");
            info.setSubject("Apache PDFBox adding meta-data to PDF document");
            info.setAuthor("Memorynotfound.com");
            info.setCreator("Memorynotfound.com");
            info.setProducer("Memorynotfound.com");
            info.setKeywords("Apache, PdfBox, XMP, PDF");
            info.setCreationDate(Calendar.getInstance());
            info.setModificationDate(Calendar.getInstance());
            info.setTrapped("Unknown");
            info.setCustomMetadataValue("swag", "yes");

            XMPMetadata metadata = XMPMetadata.createXMPMetadata();

            AdobePDFSchema pdfSchema = metadata.createAndAddAdobePDFSchema();
            pdfSchema.setKeywords(info.getKeywords());
            pdfSchema.setProducer(info.getProducer());

            XMPBasicSchema basicSchema = metadata.createAndAddXMPBasicSchema();
            basicSchema.setModifyDate(info.getModificationDate());
            basicSchema.setCreateDate(info.getCreationDate());
            basicSchema.setCreatorTool(info.getCreator());
            basicSchema.setMetadataDate(info.getCreationDate());

            DublinCoreSchema dcSchema = metadata.createAndAddDublinCoreSchema();
            dcSchema.setTitle(info.getTitle());
            dcSchema.addCreator(info.getCreator());
            dcSchema.setDescription(info.getSubject());

            PDMetadata metadataStream = new PDMetadata(document);
            PDDocumentCatalog catalog = document.getDocumentCatalog();
            catalog.setMetadata(metadataStream);

            XmpSerializer serializer = new XmpSerializer();
            ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            serializer.serialize(metadata, out, false);
            metadataStream.importXMPMetadata(out.toByteArray());

            PDPage page = new PDPage();
            document.addPage(page);

            document.setDocumentInformation(info);
            document.setVersion(1.5f);
            document.save(new File("/tmp/meta-data.pdf"));
        } catch (IOException e){
            System.err.println("Exception while trying to create pdf document - " + e);
        }
    }

}

Output

When you run the previous example the meta-data.pdf document is generated. When you open this document using Acrobat Reader and check the document properties, you’ll see that every property is filled in.

Reading Meta-data from a PDF document

In the previous example we added meta-data to a PDF document. In this example we demonstrate how you can read meta-data from a PDF document. First, we read the document then obtain the PDDocumentInformation. This class holds the basic meta-data of the PDF document. Next we can also obtain the XMP meta-data of a PDF document.

package com.memorynotfound.pdf.pdfbox;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentCatalog;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentInformation;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.common.PDMetadata;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

public class PrintMetaData {

    private static final SimpleDateFormat SDF = new SimpleDateFormat();

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{

        try (PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(new File("/tmp/meta-data.pdf"))) {
            PDDocumentInformation info = document.getDocumentInformation();
            System.out.println( "Page Count=" + document.getNumberOfPages());
            System.out.println( "Title=" + info.getTitle());
            System.out.println( "Author=" + info.getAuthor());
            System.out.println( "Subject=" + info.getSubject());
            System.out.println( "Keywords=" + info.getKeywords());
            System.out.println( "Creator=" + info.getCreator());
            System.out.println( "Producer=" + info.getProducer());
            System.out.println( "Creation Date=" + SDF.format(info.getCreationDate().getTime()));
            System.out.println( "Modification Date=" + SDF.format(info.getModificationDate().getTime()));
            System.out.println( "Trapped=" + info.getTrapped());

            PDDocumentCatalog cat = document.getDocumentCatalog();
            PDMetadata metadata = cat.getMetadata();
            if (metadata != null) {
                String string =  new String( metadata.toByteArray(), "ISO-8859-1");
                System.out.println( "Metadata=" + string);
            }
        } catch (IOException e){
            System.err.println("Exception while trying to read pdf document - " + e);
        }
    }

}

Output

When the previous program is executed it’ll produce the following output.

References

• Apache PdfBox Official Website
• Apache PdfBox API Javadoc
• Apache PdfBox read PDF document
• Apache PdfBox create PDF document
• PDDocumentInformation JavaDoc
• PDMetadata JavaDoc

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