Hi Jiadi,

Glad someone knows about this :o)

I’ll take a look at this and see how I get on – were any sample PDFs that failed/looped saved so I can test them too (no problems if not!)?

Cheers,

John

Hi John,

I think that the point the metadata would get lost is when the covering pdf file is stitched to the original pdf, generating a covered version.  In the latest coversheet bazaar package uses ghostscript(gs) as the stitching program, which is not preserving the metadata.

Pdftk (https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/install-pdftk-on-redhat-or-centos/), which is a more comprehensive program that may have option to preserve the metadata, was used previously until a serious bug caused it to loop/never finish processing the stitching process for some types of pdf files. The bug was believed to be fixed in a more recent version of pdftk, but it has not been fully tested in eprints yet. 

It is probably worth to try to install the latest version of pdftk and ask eprints to use it as the stitching program.


To switch to use pdftk in eprints
/opt/eprints3/lib/plugins/EPrints/Plugin/Convert/AddCoversheet.pm line @ 215

        my $temp_output_dir = File::Temp->newdir( "ep-coversheet-finishedXXXX", TMPDIR => 1 );
        my $temp_output_file = $temp_dir.'/temp.pdf';


##switch back using pdftk 
        my $pdftk = $plugin->get_repository->get_conf( "executables", "pdftk" );
        system( $pdftk, @input_files, "cat", "output", $temp_output_file );

        copy($temp_output_file, $output_file);

        # check it worked
        unless( -e $output_file && -s $output_file ) #check files exists and is not zero length
        {
                $repository->log("[Convert::AddCoversheet] pdftk could not create '$output_file'. Check the PDF is not password-protected.");
                return;
        }


##>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
=begin GHOST
        # EPrints Services/pjw Modification to use Ghostscript rather than pdftk
        my $gs_cmd = $plugin->get_repository->get_conf( "gs_pdf_stich_cmd" );
        # add the output file
        $gs_cmd .= $temp_output_file;
        # add the input files
        foreach my $input_file (@input_files)
        {
                $gs_cmd .= " '$input_file'";
        }

        my $sys_call_status = system($gs_cmd);
        # check it worked
        if (0 == $sys_call_status)
        {
                copy($temp_output_file, $output_file);
        }
        else
        {
                my $eprint = $doc->get_eprint;
#                       $repository->mail_administrator( 'Plugin/Screen/Coversheet:email_subject',
#                                                 'Plugin/Screen/Coversheet:email_body',
#                                                 eprintid => $eprint->render_value("eprintid"),
#                                                 docid => $doc->render_value("docid") );

                $repository->log("[Convert::AddCoversheet] Ghostscript could not create '$output_file'. Check the PDF is not password-protected.");
                return;
        }
=end GHOST
=cut
##<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<


        EPrints::Utils::chown_for_eprints( $output_file );

in archive/[repoid]/cfg/cfg.d/z_coversheet.pl  @line 30

##Add pdftk executable path:
$c->{executables}->{pdftk} = "/usr/bin/pdftk";

Best
Jiadi

Hi,

Does anyone around here have anything to do with the 'Coverpages' bazaar package?

http://bazaar.eprints.org/cgi/search/simple?q=Coversheets 

In particular I'm looking at the metadata associated with the resulting (covered) PDF. On the UKCoRR mailing list, there was a claim that some work had been done so that metadata that existed in the original PDF wasn't affected?

Cheers,

John

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-- 

Jiadi Yao

jy2e08@ecs.soton.ac.uk

EPrints Services

3081, Building 32

University of Southampton