unable to view PDF metadata -

[Archive]

[Originally posted by jefferyjjensen on 2008-03-21 21:54:12-07]

Hello ExifTool,

I have some PDF files which were created from IrfanView and its PDF plugin by ComSquare.ch called ImPDF. Adobe Acrobat Reader is able to view the image and the document properties with no problems, but when I use ExifTool on the pdf to view the metadata, I get the following error message:

"Not an ARRAY reference at Image/ExifTool/PDF.pm line 1089, EXIFTOOL_FILE line 55."

the EXIFTOOL_FILE is a tag with less than and greater than symbols enclosing it (problems posting if I include it)

Any ideas what is going wrong?

Thanks,

Jeff Jensen

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-03-22 00:03:41-07]

Hi Jeff,

This is definitely something new for me.  This will require some
debugging to figure out, so a sample file will be extremely
useful if you can provide one.  (my mail is philharvey66 at gmail.com)

Thanks.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-03-22 11:27:51-07]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you very much for the sample.  This PDF file contains a
dictionary inside the Info dictionary, and this was causing exiftool
the problem.  This is something I have never seen before, but
exiftool should have been able to handle it.  The next release
(version 7.22) will fix this problem, but until then you can fix
your local copy by adding this at line 1088 in lib/Image/ExifTool/PDF.pm
(unless you are using the Windows executable version, in which case
you'll have to wait for the official release in a few days):

Code:

               next if ref $val ne 'ARRAY';

It turns out that the obvious thing to do is the correct choice,
and exiftool should have been just ignoring this dictionary
because it doesn't contain any useful meta information.

Thanks again for reporting this and providing the sample.
I always enjoy squashing code bugs.

- Phil