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Some weird values showing in Explorer

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Philippe Bruno
Posts: 5
Joined: February 23, 2021 - 07:46
Some weird values showing in Explorer
by Philippe Bruno » February 23, 2021 - 08:46

Hi, I really love your tool. Adobe should buy this of you!

Anyway, I did encounter a very peculiar problem. I added the Authors (with an "s" at the end despite the fact it is singular in Acrobat) and the Title fields to my Explorer window, and while looking at the Authors column in a folder full of PDFs, I noticed some weird values. For example, some PDFs had names listed as Authors that I knew for sure were wrong. For example, a PDF document created by a colleague named "Bob Smith" would display "John Doe" under Authors. I opened the file in Acrobat, went to Properties and the Author field was blank. I typed "Bob Smith", saved the PDF, and checked in Explorer. This time, the Authors column showed the right author.

Could it be that there are more than one “Author” field in the PDF document and if one is blank, you return the other one? Also, could on related to the fact that Authors is plural in Explorer but singular in Acrobat?

This is not a showstopper, but I am curious as to what could be causing that.

coolsoft
Posts: 1978
Joined: March 25, 2012 - 01:19
Re: Some weird values showing in Explorer
by coolsoft » February 23, 2021 - 09:00

PDF specifications had a lot of revisions, and the same happened to metadata.
In older PDF formats, metadata were saved as a PDF object payload; in newer ones the same informations are embedded XML.
These two ways are not exclusive, so they could be present together in the same file (for compatibility reasons); if so, they shoud contain the same data.

That said, I can't exclude that some PDF tool only updated one of the metadata container and not both.
PDFPropertyExtension uses the newer one, falling back to the oldest if missing.

Can't wait to take a look at one of those PDFs 😉.
Please post a sample file here (the smallest the better) and I'll have a look...
(if file contains reserved/non-public data, please send it using the contact form and specify you don't want it to be publicly visible)

Philippe Bruno
Posts: 5
Joined: February 23, 2021 - 07:46
Re: Some weird values showing in Explorer
by Philippe Bruno » February 23, 2021 - 09:23

Wow, that was a fast reply!

As soon as I catch the same problem again, I will forward you the "untouched" file so you can examine it.

Thanks a lot.

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