I have been yearning for a while for a device that would help me manage pdf files with the ease and convenience I currently manage my mp3 files. I searched around on the net for a while but didn’t find anything that would fit my needs (there was an interesting MacOS program though). I settled to build the program myself.

I identified the iTextSharp library as my tool for reading and writing pdf metadata. The library is counter-intuitive on some points and it took a while to figure out that the pdfstamper was the best object to use to edit metadata.

This project was my first foray into the world of winforms and it was pretty instructive in that regard. The main lesson learnt was that EventHandlers are your friend. The listview control came in in handy as it was my primary mode of displaying the files being managed. I had to tweak it to enable sorting by various columns and will have to tweak some more to get filtering of items by a query term.

PDF manager

 

 

 

 

Next steps

The whole search mechanism is missing. I could implement this by extracting text from the pdfs and sticking this in a lucene index. If the index returns filenames (and we assume filenames are unchanged) then I would have full text search of pdfs.

I would also like to implement bulk editing of metadata.

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