PDFBox Working with Metadata

PDF document has many properties. These properties provide the metadata information related to PDF document. There is no guarantee that all PDF files will have all the metadata we need as some fields are optional.

PDF document contains the following properties-

File Name	It holds the name of the File.
Title	It is used to set the Title of the PDF document.
Author	It is used to set the Author name of the PDF document.
Subject	It is used to specify the Subject of the document.
Application	It is used to set the Application of the document.
Keyword	It is used to create the list of the Keywords from which we can search the document.
Created	It is used to set the Date for the creation of document.
Modified	It is used to set the Date of the modification of the document.
Producer	It is used to set the producer name of the document.

PDFBox provides PDDocumentInformation class for setting the document properties. This class has a set of setter and getter method. Setter method is used to set the value for document properties and getter method is used to retrieve that value.

Working with Setter () method-

The important Setter methods of PDDocumentInformation class are as following-

setAuthor(String author)- This method is used to set the value for the author name.
setTitle(String title)- This method is used to set the value for the PDF document title.
setCreator(String creator)- This method is used to set the value for the creator of the PDF document.
setSubject(String subject)- This method is used to set the value for specify the subject of the PDF document.
setKeywords(String keywords list)- This method is used to set the value for the keywords.
setCreationDate(Calander date)- This method is used to set the value for the creation of the PDF document.
setModificationDate(Calander date)- This method is used to set the value for the modification of the PDF document.

Example-

This example explains how to add properties like Author, Title, Date, Subject etc. to a PDF document.

import java.io.IOException; 
import java.util.Calendar; 
import java.util.GregorianCalendar;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentInformation;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDPage;

public class DocumentProperties{	
	public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException {
				
		//Creating PDF document object
	      PDDocument doc = new PDDocument();
		
		//Creating a blank page
	      PDPage blankPage = new PDPage();
	
	//Adding the blank page to the document
	doc.addPage( blankPage );

	//Creating the PDDocumentInformation object 
	      PDDocumentInformation pdd = doc.getDocumentInformation();

	//Setting the author of the document
	pdd.setAuthor("JavaTpoint");
	
	// Setting the title of the document
	pdd.setTitle("My Document"); 
	
	//Setting the creator of the document 
	pdd.setCreator("SSSIT"); 
	
	//Setting the subject of the document 
	pdd.setSubject("PDF Example"); 
	
	//Setting the created date of the document 
	      Calendar date = new GregorianCalendar();
	date.set(2018, 5, 7); 
	pdd.setCreationDate(date);
	
	//Setting the modified date of the document 
	date.set(2018, 6, 5); 
	pdd.setModificationDate(date); 
	
	//Setting keywords for the document 
	pdd.setKeywords("Java, example, my pdf");

//Setting Producer for the document 
		pdd.setProducer("JavaTpoint.com"); 
	
	//Saving the document 
	doc.save("/eclipse-workspace/blank.pdf");

	   System.out.println("Properties added successfully to a PDF document.");

	//Closing the document
	doc.close();
	}
}

Output:

After successful execution of the above program, it retrieves the text from the PDF document as shown in the following output.

Working with getter () Method-

The important getter method of PDDocumentInformation class are as follows-

getAuthor()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the Author name.
getTitle()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the document Title name.
getCreator()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the document Creator name.
getSubject()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the Subject name of the PDF document.
getKeyword()- This method is used to retrieve the value of Keyword for PDF document.
getCreationDate()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the Creation Date of the PDF document.
getModificationDate()- This method is used to retrieve the value of the Modification Date of the PDF document.

Example-

This example explains how to add properties like Author, Title, Date, Subject etc. to a PDF document.

import java.io.File; 
import java.io.IOException;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument; 
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentInformation;

public class DocumentProperties {	
	public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException {
				
		//Loading an existing document 
	      File file = new File("/eclipse-workspace/blanck.pdf");
	      PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(file);
	
	//Getting the PDDocumentInformation object
	      PDDocumentInformation pdd = doc.getDocumentInformation();

	//Retrieving the info of a PDF document
	    System.out.println("Author of the PDF document is :"+ pdd.getAuthor());
	    System.out.println("Title of the PDF document is :"+ pdd.getTitle());
	    System.out.println("Subject of the document is :"+ pdd.getSubject());

	  System.out.println("Creator of the PDF document is :"+ pdd.getCreator());
      System.out.println("Keywords of the PDF document are :"+ pdd.getKeywords());

        System.out.println("Creation date of the PDF document is :"+ pdd.getCreationDate());
	      System.out.println("Modification date of the PDF document is :"+ pdd.getModificationDate()); 
	
	//Closing the document
	doc.close();
	}
}

Output:

After successful execution of the above program, it retrieves all the attributes of the PDF document which can be shown in the following output.