A Document Card Written Elsewhere

Carry the document's identity card exactly as another program wrote it, instead of the one created from `metadata`.

Summary

The card that describes a document — its title, its author, its dates, its references — often exists before the PDF does: the archive or the image bank that holds your files wrote it, with fields of its own. Sent here, it goes into the document as it is, and nothing in it is rewritten. The title and the author you give in metadata still appear in the reading software's document properties.

Technically

Written at the top level of a request, under "metadata_packet"

metadata_packet names a supplied part holding a complete XMP packet; its bytes become the document's own /Metadata stream, unchanged and unchecked, in place of the packet the library writes from metadata. The fields of metadata then reach the document information dictionary alone. A claim of conformance lives inside the packet, which the library does not write here, so a packet given this way cannot stand beside a claim.

Request Schema

  • metadata_packet — string, optional, absent by default. The name of the supplied part holding the packet. A name no part carries is refused.
  • Refused beside archive, accessible or print, beside metadata.schemas, metadata.declarations or an invoice, and beside fields of metadata when information_dictionary is turned off: each of those is written inside the packet the library creates, and would have nowhere to go.
  • metadata_files ties its files to this packet as it does to the one the library writes.

A Whole Request That Creates a PDF

{
  "metadata_packet": "card_xmp",
  "metadata": { "title": "Survey of the north wing" },
  "standard_fonts": [{ "name": "sans", "face": "helvetica" }],
  "items": [
    {
      "type": "text",
      "rect": { "llx": 72, "lly": 700, "urx": 523, "ury": 740 },
      "content": ["A document whose card was written by the archive"],
      "font": "sans",
      "font_size": 12
    }
  ]
}

The line that sends it, in three languages

The document as a whole

The Numbers Reading Software Shows A Hundred Letters in a Single File What the Document Says about Itself What the Document Says about Itself, Said Once Text Nobody Can Copy The Notes a Program Leaves in the File for Itself The Notes a Program Leaves on One Page The Data a Program Hangs on a Run of Ink A File Still Readable Decades from Now The Print Standard the Document Claims The Variable Print Standard the Document Claims The Password That Opens It, and What May Be Done with It An Invoice a Person and a Machine Both Read The Address Relative Links Are Read Against The PDF Version the File Declares The Extensions to PDF the File Says It Uses What a Picture Says about Itself, and How It Is Read The Attachments the Document Carries Beside Its Pages Files the Document Names without Carrying The Attachments Shown as a Portfolio Which Attachments a Page Claims Which Attachments a Font Claims The Identity Card a Single Font Carries Which Attachments the Document's Card Claims The Areas of a Page a Reader Measures In The Identity Card a Single Page Carries The Accessibility Standard the Document Claims The Standards the Finished Document Is Measured Against

Where to Go Next

Every JSON key of a request, in one page The other forty-one settings of a request

See the Prices See the Examples