Question

Need a script to read pdf document info.

Asked by: devlinb

I currently have a folder on my Intranet server (IIS 4)containing many pdf files. Can anyone provide me with a "property reader" for pdf similar to the DSOLEFILE.DLL provided by Microsoft for use with MS Office documents.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period00/fso.htm

Used in conjunction with the FileSystemObject you can trawl through folders, read each document's properties and generate html and hyperlinks on the fly.

Basically I want dumb users to drop their pdf's into a folder on the server, and have an asp or similar to read each file's properties and display Author, Subject and Title (with hyperlink). I've looked at adobe.com but can't find anything suitable.

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Asked On
2001-07-31 at 08:56:30ID20160941
Tags

filesystemobject

,

pdf

Topic

Miscellaneous Web Development

Participating Experts
3
Points
100
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: webwomanPosted on 2001-07-31 at 10:24:56ID: 6338061

You're not going to find anything on Adobe's site, because this has nothing to do with PDF -- and everything to do with the SERVER.

YOu need to set up a form for the user to upload their files. You won't have a whole lot of control over what or how they upload, though you certainly could write something that ran on the server and deleted anything that didn't meet your specs (for filetype/size).

That dll is specifically designed to work with IIS -- it's not going to work with Apache, or on a UNIX box. It works with MS stuff because MS wrote it.

 

by: raizonPosted on 2001-07-31 at 10:31:32ID: 6338075

I believe the point of the question was finding some way to read the properties of the PDF files dynamically to display the Author, Subject and Title of the file.

What I would do is

1.  In my upload form I would have text fields for the
Author, Subject and Title of the PDF.

2.  Create a DB with a table to hold that information and relate that table to anotherone that held the path to the file that was uploaded.

3.  When reading through the directory with the FileSystemObject query the DB to get the Information and build your page based off of that.

Raizon

 

by: coreytiPosted on 2001-07-31 at 10:53:19ID: 6338141

There is a Perl module that can take care of this stuff if you're able to use Perl for your project.

Checkout the PDF::Parse library at:
http://search.cpan.org/doc/ANTRO/PDF-111/PDF/Parse.pm

-corey

 

by: devlinbPosted on 2001-08-06 at 03:11:11ID: 6355247

thanks coreyti,
This script works fine - except for PDF's which have any security built-in. When security is added to a PDF the document info is encrypted in some way and displays as garbage. Is there any way to get around this?

 

by: webwomanPosted on 2001-08-06 at 13:57:49ID: 6357211

Unlikely. It's got security because it's not supposed to be accessible.

 

by: devlinbPosted on 2001-08-07 at 02:07:08ID: 6358728

I disagree - the document information is still accessible in the reader even after a pdf has been secured. Why would Adobe want to make this inaccessible when all you want to do is prevent a pdf document from being modified?

 

by: devlinbPosted on 2001-08-09 at 09:18:40ID: 6368770

When security is added to a PDF, the document info is encrypted in some way and displays as garbage. Is there any way to get around
this?

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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