PDF metadata viewer / tag editor for Ubuntu

1. View pdf metadata for a file called Example.pdf:

   pdfinfo Example.pdf  
   

2. Edit existing metadata in the terminal using nano editor:

   pdftk Example.pdf dump_data output Metadata-output.txt
   nano Metadata-output.txt  
   

3. Update metadata:

   pdftk Example.pdf update_info Metadata-output.txt output Example-new.pdf
   

_{Nano editor keyboard shortcuts
Use the keyboard combination Ctrl + O and after that press Enter to save the file to its current location.
Use the keyboard combination Ctrl + X to exit nano.}

CLI solution

Another utility worth looking into is exiftool. The advantage exiftool holds over pdfinfo is that it supports a lot more metadata types (e.g. XMP tags).

Here's an example of a command that will print all available meta information (-a), sorted by groups (-G1):

exiftool -a -G1 "$File"

Overviews of the supported PDF-related tags:

• PDF Tags
• XMP PDF tags
• XMP dc tags

You can install exiftool on Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

---

GUI solution

If you are looking for a GUI PDF metadata viewer/editor you could give PDFMtEd a try. It's a a set of graphical utilities I wrote for managing PDF metadata with exiftool: