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If you have Adobe Reader select File > Properties which brings up the Document Properties window.This is sometimes a requirement for legal reasons or done because of security or privacy concerns. Metadata add value to a file but there may be circumstances where you want to remove them. I haven’t tested this one so cannot comment on its reliability or usefulness for print production beyond its file size limitation of 10 MB. There are also online tools, like PDF Candy, to edit metadata. Tools like Exiftool allow you to extract or embed the metadata. For very specific types of metadata, a plug-in might be available to facilitate data entry or provide users with clear guidelines and choices for entering data. PDF editing tools, such as Adobe Acrobat Professional, allow you to add metadata or edit them.
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Such information is embedded in PDF metadata fields when the layout is exported to PDF.
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In InDesign, for instance, you can use the ‘File Info’ menu option to define metadata such as the document title, description, author, keywords and copyright-related information. Many content creation applications, such as Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, or Adobe Photoshop, allow users to define metadata for its files. Professional content management systems can not just display metadata but also allow for extensive searches based on the keywords or description field. Theoretically operating systems should also be able to do this but while an operating system like Windows 7 is great at showing picture related metadata (such as the resolution, bit depths, keywords.) or music-related metadata (such as the artist, album, and genre), it fails to do so for PDF files.
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Adobe Bridge, for example, allows you to browse through folders containing PDF files and check basic metadata such as the author, description, and copyright of PDF files. Applications geared towards managing libraries of data can show metadata.
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