Does anyone know how, when creating a PDF, metadata such as 'Title' (drawing title), 'Author' (as in person rather than App) and Keywords can be included?
This greatly assists in finding them out of a morass of drawing numbers! By adding Property Handlers (eg PDF - ShellTools) this data can be displayed in both the columns and display panes of Windows etc Folder Views. What would be ideal is if the 'tags' used to populate the drawing title box could be exported when creating the PDF.
I found this link, but it is beyond my skill set! www.rasteredge.com/.../pdf-document-metadata As I understand it, you could write a VBA macro to call a .dll (which must be preloaded at start-up), and then include this in the PDF.pltcfg file (which you can update when printing using 'File/Edit printer driver configuration')? Can anyone help me with how this is done?
Unknown said:I found this link, but it is beyond my skill set! www.rasteredge.com/.../pdf-document-metadata
You're the first, and only, person to ask for that meta-data. RasterEdge provide an SDK whereby a C# developer could write an AddIn for MicroStation that would enable the provision of meta-data. However, the entry-level cost for that SDK is $900: how much are you prepared to pay for that AddIn?
Regards, Jon Summers LA Solutions
.
Answer Verified By: Rick Ruth
I believe the following VBA macro and indicated pdf.pltcfg customization should do the job for Author and Title. But not Keywords. This is provided as-is and unsupported.
MVBA & .bas source at ftp://ftp.bentley.com/pub/outgoing/CfgVarsFromDgnProperties.zip. Note the pdf.pltcfg variable references in the screenshot. You'll want to set the VBA for auto-load in VBA project manager.
The variables are defined during an event fired after a model is loaded. So you will need to reopen the DGN after loading the VBA macro to see an effect the first time.
There may be better ways to accomplish this.
Unknown said:I believe the following VBA macro and indicated pdf.pltcfg customization should do the job
It looks like that works because PDFAuthor and PDFDocumentTitle are already defined (but empty) in pdf.pltcfg, and all we need do is set the config. variables. What if we want to add other meta-data?
The current PDF printer driver only supports writing "Author" and "Title" properties in the PDF metadata. There's no way to get around that in V8i. In CE Update 2, all of the DGN metadata property types, i.e. subject, keywords, etc., will be supported. There is no support for custom metadata properties. A custom post-processing step that opened the PDF file and modified it could handle that, but would be much more sophisticated than what I presented here.