Comma in Author Field

[fewilcox]

First, a general praise of PDFXE. This is usually a very long rave, but I'll keep it short this time for your sake as well as mine.

In college a driver sent me flying off my bike, and I hit the street headfirst with enough force to shatter my spine. That resulted in two things that affect how I interact with computers: chronic pain in my upper back, and brain damage resulting in memory loss and a reduction of my ability to understand symbols. That makes ribbon UIs worse than useless – they actually hinder me greatly. That's why I am so thankful that PDFXE gives me highly-customizable traditional toolbars, and keyboard-navigable, logically-arranged drop-down menus. Foxit recently went ribbon-only, forcing me to uninstall it, so I'm trying to get the word out to the makers of my favorite software so I don't have to do it again. So, on behalf of disabled computer users everywhere, thank you.

---------------------------

One of my few complaints about OpenOffice is that it won't let me specify how I want my name displayed in the metadata of exported PDFs, so I use pdftk to apply my preferred version – Frank Wilcox, Jr (fewilcox) – since I use "fewilcox" as my URL whenever possible, making it easier to find my other work, and my dad is an artist and accountant with a Web presence, so he of course uses "Frank Wilcox", so anyone looking on facebook, for instance, would likely find him before me.

The problem is that if I then edit the document in PDFXE, it changes that comma into a semicolon. I understand why it does that in the keyword field, but in the author field it's highly irritating. My current fix is to then re-extract the metadata with the command-line utility pdftk, fix it in EditPad, then re-apply it with pdftk. It would be far easier if PDFXE would just let me use the comma in the first place. Since the document I'm currently working on changes frequently, I'm simply leaving out the comma this time, but need a solution for other documents since I give out lots of PDF game aids (character sheets, a pocketmod Pokédex, etc.) via my blog, and will be releasing many more in the future.

Is there a setting I'm overlooking, or would this require a feature request?

I should mention that I'm an old DOS guy who had a love at first sight moment with UNIX, and have Windows set up to launch an elevated command prompt when I hit Ctrl-Alt-C (and use the Start Menu search (via the Windows key instead of the mouse) more than any other OS feature other than the taskbar itself), so batch replacing metadata with pdftk is actually far easier for me than doing it with a GUI, but that's a lot of extra work just to change one field.

[Willy Van Nuffel]

Hello Frank,

Myself, I am afraid that the automatic replacement of the comma by a semicolon is related with the "List separator" in the settings of Windows Control Panel (Region > Formats > Additional Settings).

In the Author field (in the Document Properties of the PDF) this character (list separator) is used to make the distinction between two or more authors. As a matter of fact, PDF-XChange Viewer shows the same behavior.

The only solution that I have found, is to put your name between double quotes in the Author field, like this:
"Frank Wilcox, Jr (fewilcox)"

I leave it up to Tracker Support to give you a final answer.

Best regards.

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the post - I see the same thing here and I don't personally see any reason that that we would need to change a comma to a semi-colon.

From what I can see, I don't believe that we're using the Windows list separator, as I changed the list separator in Windows and it did not change the Editor's behaviour.

I'll pass the suggestion along to the Dev. Team for consideration, but I cannot guarantee the change, nor that it would be considered a priority at this time.

Thanks,