RubyPDF Blog

Here is a requirement that want to batch dump xmp from PDF to xml file or Database,

I’d like to know if you have developed or if you can develop an application for extracting customize XMP from PDF documents.

I’ll try to be more relevant: I customized a specific card for additional metadata in Acrobat Professional. If I save the xmp properties in xml format, I obtain the value that I inserted, after that I import xml file in Database. I’d like to know if is possible to develop an application that can extract xmp customized value from a group of PDF files.

And what is XMP?

Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing, and leveraging this valuable metadata — opening the door for more efficient job processing, workflow automation, and rights management, among many other possibilities. With XMP, Adobe has taken the “heavy lifting” out of metadata integration, offering content creators an easy way to embed meaningful information about their projects and providing industry partners with standards-based building blocks to develop optimized workflow solutions.

Finally, I used iTextSharp(of course iText also ok) to batch extract XMP from PDF, and save it to XML.

I just finished a bid from RentAcoder, the title is “Web service (C#) to digitally sign PDF documents”, it is a private bid, the requirement is,

Buyer needs a C# web service that will digitally sign a PDF created using ITextSharp.

The PDF will be already created and would be updated with a digital signature by the new web service. The web service would take as parameters the name of the document and some user authentication information (user id and password). The web service would validate the user id/password and sign the document digitally with a self-signed certificate.

The signature that appears on the document will be either an image of a signature or a unique text field like Sergie.Norwinski.123456.

The web service will also return a numeric return code and return message indicating success or failure.

The web service should also add the success or failure status to a SQL Server 2005 database. The database already contains the stored procedures to authenticate user identity and log the status of the request; the new web service simply needs to execute them.

Buyer will provide the self-signed certificates that are to be used by the web service.

And the buyer said,

Steven was an absolute delight to work with. He was very timely with his deliverables and the code provided worked as intended and was easily integrated into an existing application.

He was extremely flexible, accomodating, resourceful and has a great sense of ingenuity and creativity. Great C# skills and exceptional PDF and iTextSharp knowledge.

The pitfall of this bid, need parser PDF and get the x and y coordinates from the special given text, for example, get the x and y coordinates of “Signature/Credentials:” and put the signature after it, get the x and y coordinates of “Date Signed:”, and put the date string after it, but by default, iTextSharp does not support it.

He said about PdfDivide

Great program! Thanks very much.
I’m not sure what your aims are with this, but I know from searching for a solution for the past while that there is some real demand for it, with everyone but you claiming either it is impossible or requires a very expensive piece of software. I imagine if you made your website a bit more accessible, you could sell quite a few of these. Not that you asked for advice, but there it is.
Thanks again. It works great – even seems to save my OCR stuff.
Thanks!
Tom

P.S.
Tom is a university professor of Simon Fraser University(sfu.ca)