Search and Replace Keywords in PDF

[riffrack]

Hello there

A complete newbie here. I have spent a good few hours searching through the various sites explaining ExifTool, however I cannot find a straight forward explanation on how to accomplish the following:

I have a few hundred pdf files with almost correct keywords stored in XML. Now I want to search & replace only part of these keywords. E.g. a spelling mistake: the XML tag was spelt <privat></privat> instead of <private></private>. This is part of a larger XML string in the keywords metadata.

In another case I need to remove an XML tag completely: <Country>UK</Country><Country>IT</Country><Country>US</Country>. Here I would need to remove the value <Country>IT</Country> completely or in other words replace <Country>IT</Country> with an empty string.

I use Windows OS.

Can this be done with a single command line or is it more complicated? I would need to run this as a batch.

Any help is much appreciated.

[Phil Harvey]

Sorry, but ExifTool doesn't write XML.  (Unless you are talking about XMP, which is RDF/XML)

So I don't think you can use ExifTool to do what you want.

But if you are talking about XMP, removing the XMP Country tag is done like this:

exiftool -country= some.pdf

But note that PDF edits by ExifTool are reversible, so the original information still actually exists in the file.

- Phil

[riffrack]

Hi Phil

Thanks for your answer. All I want to do is replace a string. It doesn't matter if the text in the keywords field is formatted as XML or not. Let's say the keywords just contained plain text: "This is a PDF documeent" and I would want to replace the typo "documeent" with "document". Can I do this with ExifTool? Simple Search and Replace.

If I open a PDF document in Adobe Reader, I can click on Properties and edit the keywords field with any text I want. Somehow I would like to able to correct this data.

Any help much appreciated.

[Phil Harvey]

Yes.  You will be able to do this with ExifTool.

First, use ExifTool to extract the information with the -s option:

exiftool -s file.pdf

Then, look through the information until you find the name of the tag you want to change.  Use a command like this to write the new information (where TAG is the name of the tag to write):

exiftool -TAG="some new string" file.pdf

- Phil