10.4: Use Preview to set keywords in PDFs

Jun 06, '05 09:00:00AM

Contributed by: victory

Tiger only hintThe updated Preview.app that comes with Tiger now offers a few extra features when used with PDF files. Besides the ability to do simple image editing and annotations, you are now able to add your own keywords to the internal properties header of a PDF file. Why is this useful?

Because not all scanners or scanning solutions do OCR. In my case, I have an extremely fast page scanner that will take a dozen or so pages and spit out a PDF in about a minute. However, the scans only contain a graphic image of the pages, not the actual text content of the file (and therefore invisible to Spotlight). This isn't as bad as it sounds, particularly if you're scanning your documents primarily for archival reasons (i.e. getting rid of mountains of paper clutter) .... or at least that's what I told myself until Spotlight was released. Now that Tiger has the ability to search for material based on content, I've begun looking for third party apps to take my previously scanned PDFs and add text content by OCR.

While I haven't decided upon a final solution yet, there is another option I'm considering that others may find useful: Instead of using OCR, manually add your own keywords to the internal properties stored along with every PDF file.

Prior to Tiger, one of the easier ways to do this was the shareware app PDFPen, which allows you to fill in the author, subject, and keyword fields in a PDF document. PDFPen is a great app that I continue to use, particularly for its ability to rearrange, insert, and delete individual pages in a single PDF file. But as it turns out, one of the stated improvements in Tiger's Preview.app is this same capability. Tools -> Get Info : Keywords tab. Whatever keywords are added to a PDF will then be visible from Spotlight.

Granted it's not as easy nor as automatic as a full OCR of a document, but at least it does allow you to specify and target your PDFs internal metadata a bit more accurately than just relying on the filename, etc.

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