ability to specify PDF metadata in print dialog

[Mark Edgington]

Binary package hint: cups-pdf

It would be nice if it were possible to specify (or override if it is somehow automatically specified) various metadata for a PDF to be created by cups-pdf in the print dialog window. What I mean by metadata is the sorts of things you see when you right click on a PDF file, select "Properties", and then select the "Document" tab in the resulting window -- things like "Title", "Subject", "Author", "Keywords", "Creator", ...

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

CUPS-PDF is only a CUPS back-end. It has nothing to do with the Print dialog, which is a feature within gtkprint and gnomeprint. :)

[Mark Edgington (edgimar)]

Yes, this is true. But doesn't cups-pdf expose (via cups) some kind of interface which gnomeprint makes use of to display the options? Could it be that both would need to be changed? I admit that I don't know much about how everything ties together, but my request is still the same.

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

No, CUPS-PDF doesn't expose any interface to define this, nor does it offer any Print dialog; it is only a printer driver. It is up to each application to define that meta content. For instance, OpenOffice defines these via the Document Properties menu under File.

[Mark Edgington (edgimar)]

It seems that the CUPS-PDF backend uses ghostscript as the 'real' backend, and ghostscript (as far as I can tell) currently doesn't offer any way of setting the metadata. If it did (or will at some point), then I believe an interface to set this metadata could be added to the CUPS-PDF backend. But as it stands, this is not possible -- does that sound correct?

I tried a simple test, editing a file in OpenOffice, changing various properties in the file menu, and then printing via CUPS-PDF. But, none of the changed properties were visible in the produced PDF.

Of course each program can provide its own means of generating PDF files (in OpenOffice, that would be using File->Export as PDF), but it is unreasonable to assume that all programs which can print must/should also provide a means of generating their own PDF files. This is where having customizable PDF metadata on the CUPS-backend level makes sense.