Introduction

The Document Information Block is optional. Within Adobe Acrobat there is a feature to view information about a file by choosing Document Properties from the File menu. With AppendPDF Pro and AppendPDF it is possible to populate certain fields of the Document Info with the parameter file. A sample of a Document Properties dialog screen from Acrobat is shown below.

Document Info screen

Below is a Document Info screen in Acrobat for a Sample PDF, also called Document Properties.

Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords are fields in the Document Info screen as shown in the figure above. These are the fields that can be modified by AppendPDF Pro and AppendPDF. Enter values in the parameter file as you would like to see them appear when you call up the Document Properties in Acrobat. The fields Title, Subject and Author refer to information specific to that document. Keywords (this is Acrobat’s Keywords, not to be confused with the many other references to keywords in this manual) are usually simple words used for sorting and grouping (December, ProjectX, personal, etc.) and are useful for those who will be indexing their documents with Acrobat Catalog and would like to improve searching efficiency. More about indexing can be found in the Acrobat Guide or the Reader Guide if you don’t have the full version of Acrobat. (Either guide can be found under the Help menu of its respective application.)

To specify document information in a parameter file, list the name of the field followed by its value in parentheses. Before beginning this section the keyword begin_info must be added to the parameter file. At the end of the list close the section with the end_infokeyword:

begin_info
Title (AppendPDF Pro Test)
Subject (testing AppendPDF Pro with sample files)
Author (Appligent, Inc.)
Keywords (testing AppendPDF Pro sample files)
end_info

There is no set number of tabs or spaces that need to appear between the field name and the value in parentheses, as long as there is at least one tab or space. Also, if you do not want to include a Document Info field (for example, if you want Title and Subject, but not Author and Keywords) make sure that keyword is not listed in the Document Info block. Items listed with empty parentheses will cause AppendPDF or AppendPDF Pro to fail.

Make sure that all Document Info keywords (Title, Subject, Author, Keywords) are spelled correctly or AppendPDF and AppendPDF Pro will treat them as custom strings. Custom strings are discussed in the next section.

Optional Custom Information to Add within Document Info

AppendPDF and AppendPDF Pro support two custom field types: strings and dates. These can be added within the Document Info block of the AppendPDF or AppendPDF Pro parameter file which saves them in the keywords section of the Document Properties. The keywords can then be indexed with Acrobat Catalog.

The name of a custom string can be anything you want. Give it any name that will have meaning to you and/or be easy for you to remember. For example:

String1 (This file created by AppendPDF Pro)

or

ExtraText (AppendPDF Pro document)

Custom dates need to conform to the format D:YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. Acrobat Catalog allows dates to be searched using boolean operators. You can tell Catalog to find, for example, invoices whose date is greater than 1999 and less than 2000. A custom date in the Document Info block of the parameter file can be entered as:

DocDate (D:20170714235659)

This example indicates a date of 14 July 2017 with a time of 23:56:59.