Give exiftool a try, it is available from the package libimage-exiftool-perl in the repositories.
As an example, If you have a pdf file called drawing.pdf and you want to update its metadata, Use the utility, exiftool, in this way:
exiftool -Title="This is the Title" -Author="Happy Man" -Subject="PDF Metadata" drawing.pdf
For some reason the Subject entered ends up in the keywords field of the metadata in the pdf file. not a problem in some cases, even desirable, however, this may be problematic, evince and the nautilus metadata previewer do not show this but Adobe Acrobat viewer and PDF-XChange viewer does.
The program will create a backup of the original file if you do not use the; -overwrite_original
switch, this means a duplicate will exist in the folder where the updated pdf is. From example above; a file named ; drawing.pdf_original will be created.
use the overwrite switch at your own risk, my suggestion is not to use it and script something to move this file to a better location just in case.
I would recommend that you use the excellent program called recoll, available in the repositories, to index your documents and then use it to search.
recoll can be used from the commandline with the -t switch like this;
recoll -t author:"Christopher Negus"
where the string in quotes is the author of a pdf document of interest, see below;
![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NvjdP.png)
The recoll Gui is fast and intuitive;
![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cxxQw.png)
See more here; http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
You may also use a specialized e-book management system like Calibre,again available from the repositories.
Best Answer
The latest version of exiftool supports most file formats.
Output:
inputfile
, but saves a copy of the original asinputfile_original
in the same folder.There are options in ExifTool to delete the original file:
-overwrite_original
and-overwrite_original_in_place
.