Metadata

PDF metadata appears in document properties (title bar, PDF viewer info panel, search indexes). Set it deterministically from your application data.

Available fields

Field	Method	Notes
Title	doc.setTitle(...)	Document title
Author	doc.setAuthor(...)	Person or system that authored the content
Subject	doc.setSubject(...)	Short description
Keywords	doc.setKeywords(...)	Space- or comma-separated keywords
Creator	doc.setCreator(...)	Application that produced the content
Producer	(set by PDFixa)	Set to "PDFixa x.y" by default

Example

try (PdfDocument doc = new PdfDocument()) {
    doc.setTitle("Monthly Sales Report — March 2024");
    doc.setAuthor("Finance System");
    doc.setSubject("Sales figures by region");
    doc.setCreator("Acme Reporting v3.2");

    PdfPage page = doc.addPage(595, 842);
    // ... add content ...

    doc.writeTo(outputStream);
}

Determinism rules

Metadata is serialised into the PDF and directly affects the output bytes. To keep output deterministic:

• Do not use Instant.now(), new Date(), or any wall-clock value as metadata.
• Do derive values from your input data (e.g. report period, document ID).
• Avoid machine hostnames, process IDs, or thread names.

// Bad — changes on every run
doc.setTitle("Report generated on " + LocalDate.now());

// Good — derived from input
doc.setTitle("Sales Report — " + reportPeriod);

See Deterministic Output for the complete list of rules.