PDF metadata corruption on send to device

[Andrew Sacamano]

Generally, I've had lots of success with Calibre Companion, but I have a few (not all) PDFs which get corrupted in the "Send to device" process.

When I open the content server in Calibre, I can download the files into (e.g.) MoonReader and open it just fine, but when I send the PDFs to Calibre Companion wirelessly, the resulting file in unreadable in MoonReader, Adobe's PDF Reader, and a few other apps. They all describe the file as "damanged or corrupted".

I compared the file in Calibre_Companion on the device with the file in my local Calibre library (using WiFi File Browser to transfer it), and they are different sizes, and have different content (see below):

cksum working.pdf broken.pdf
2897500834 619196 working.pdf
4245409161 616740 broken.pdf

Just to really mix things up, both PDFs are openable, and appear to work fine on my mac laptop - it's only on the mobile device that one is broken.

Disabling the PDF Metadata Writer plugin resolved the issue, and I was able to open all of the PDFs.

I've attached working (original) and broken versions (as read from device with Wifi File Browser) of the same PDF - (another example, not the 600K one above).

System details:

Calibre 0.9.16 on OS X 10.8.2
Calibre Companion 2.7.1 on Android 4.0.4 (Galaxy Tab 10.1 GT-P7510)

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

This is a bug in the library calibre uses to update PDF metadata that
apparently affects PDF files generated by OS X Quartz PDFContext. I have
reported it upstream here:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mantisbt/podofo/view.php?id=51

If/when the bug is fixed in podofo, it will be fixed in calibre as well.
Until then, either disable the pdf metadata writer, or export your files
in HTML instead of PDF (looking at the PDF metadata it appears to have
originated as a Word document).

Until podofo is fixed, not much I can do, closing bug as wontfix.

 status wontfix