When exporting a LibreOffice Writer document as PDF, document properties get saved with it and can be displayed in the reader application (e.g. PDF viewer, eBook reader, etc). I know how to set author, title, subject etc. However, how do I set the author name to an author other than myself? Use case: a selection of poems. Here I want to set the author property to the poet's name, not to my own name. I know that I could set the name in the LibreOffice user data fields. However, that setting applies to all documents, not just the one in which I want to use a different author name than my own name, and thus is undesirable. I also know that I can manipulate the document properties after they have been written to a PDF file, e.g. using pdftk or similar tool. This is an inconvenient extra step I would like to avoid. Is there any way LibreOffice Writer lets me set a document-specific author name different from the global user data setting?
asked Oct 17, 2021 at 9:58 21 6 6 bronze badgesAFAIK, once set in user data, the only way to change that field appears to be, as you state, editing the file outside of LibreOffice. This is hardly a "security" feature, since it can be manually changed: it's in the meta.xml file, easily accessed by opening the document in 7Zip. Hopefully, someone will have a better answer.
Commented Oct 17, 2021 at 20:04I fear @DrMoishePippik is correct - you need to modify the author data outside of LO. The easiest way would be to use exiftools for this task. Maybe you could write a short macro that modifies the user data before and after creating the PDF, this might be the only way to solve the issue "inside" LO. Not sure if the user data is available for macro modifications.
Commented Oct 20, 2021 at 9:13@tohuwawohu, can exiftool.exe write to ODT files? When I tested that on v. 12.2.8.0, though exiftool could read the XMP metadata, it could not write (change) or remove that data. If you can show how to do so, please change the comment to an answer, which I would appreciate! Thanks.
Commented Oct 20, 2021 at 21:08@DrMoishePippik - sorry, about the confusion: i'm not sure if exiftools is able to edit odt files - i thought about modifying the resulting PDF file (since the OP wants the PDF files to have a "custom" author metadata).
Commented Oct 21, 2021 at 5:32Not being able to do this in a satisfactory way inside LO, I ended up using exiftool with a command line similar to: exiftool -Author="Poet" Poems.pdf