how to change "author" information in PDF files

English Applications
1

Hello,

I’m using openSUSE 11.0

I’d like to change the content of the “author” field in the file information of a PDF file (the information displayed for example when hovering with the cursor over the file in Konqueror).

How can I do that and with wich application?
(Only PDF version of the file available, no text version)

Thanks!
novelljodi

2

There’s a GUI program called pdfedit, which I had on Ubuntu which might do the job, but I can’t confirm this now because the Ubuntu machine’s at work. I don’t see it in the standard repo, maybe in a contrib repo. Or build from source.

Another program that definitely will do the job is pdftk, however in a somewhat unfriendly way because it’s a CLI tool and mainly used for stream transformations (extracting pages, rotating document, etc). You do it like this:

pdftk document.pdf dump_data output document.dat
# edit the text file document.dat and change the value of the Author field
# then put the info back into the PDF like this
pdftk document.pdf update_info output newdocument.pdf

which is a bit tedious.

3

Some programs will insert the information from their properties dialogue into the PDF automatically. Lyx has a separate entry under Document>Settings. It depends on what software you are using.

Sometimes you simply need to edit the properties, save the source file and create a fresh PDF.