PDF Metadata and margins

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diskerror
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Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2025 8:11 pm
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PDF Metadata and margins

Post by diskerror »

Is there a standard or other thoughts on adding metadata to PDFs? I've been adding title and composer for the PDFs used in forScore on a 13" iPad using exiftool and I've recently started adding tables of contents using pdftk. Being a semi-retired programmer I'm enjoying streamlining this process!

Screen real estate is tight, even on a 13" iPad set in horizontal 2-up display. I use ImageMagick to straighten and tightly trim all but one pixel or so of margin from around the staff systems. I also trim off publisher and copyright information since I have no interest in those filling up precious screen space while playing or studying the music. But by trimming that information off of the scanned page I feel that this information should be placed in the file in some other form. I've been using the keywords field for this information.

Thoughts?

Here's a one page example. This was a one page ratty photo copy with pencil marks that was transcribed into Sibelius, exported as PDF, then converted to a 600dpi TIFF to mimic a document scan. I understand that the exported PDF is preferred but to show what I mean by trimming off margins I do this:

Code: Select all

magick ~/Desktop/Canzonetta.tif \
    -alpha off -colorspace gray \
    -set option:deskew:auto-crop true \
    -background white -deskew 80% +repage \
    -bordercolor white -border 0.05% \
    -threshold 50% -depth 1 -compress Group4 \
    ~/Desktop/Canzonetta.pdf
The result is attached as TIFF because I can't attach a PDF.
Attachments
tight trim sample
tight trim sample
CanzonettaTIFF.tif (85.58 KiB) Viewed 880 times
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