PDF/CHM Metadata retrieval

[Aniket Patil]

Hope this is the right forum for my query.

I've built an E-Book application using Eclipse 3.2 that archives e-books with their details (publisher etc.).

Now, I need to incorporate a new functionality into the application - I need to be able to select a folder containing ebooks (PDF/CHM Format)and I need the application to crawl through each of the books in the folder and populate the application database with the book details-name, author and other stuff.

Does anyone know how I could extract such metadata from a PDF or a CHM file through Java?

[Joel McNary]

There doesn't seem to be any open-source projects that will read PDF files (but a few that will write them.)

Here's someone's index of PDF tools for Java:

http://schmidt.devlib.org/java/libraries-pdf.html

Hope that this helps,

[Ulf Dittmer]

The document properties (including title, author, creation date etc.) can be found by using iTexts PdfReader class. Its getInfo method returns a Map that contains a variety of metadata about the document.

If you want to extract text from a PDF, then either JPedel or PDFBox can do that. All the libraries are linked in the AccessingFileFormats page.

[Vyas Sanzgiri]

Microsoft : http://poi.apache.org/

PDF: iText

[Ulf Dittmer]

POI does not handle CHM files.