I am inserting metadata into postscript files with a program, to be distilled to pdf with Adobe Distiller. I am using this code that I grabbed from an online chapter of Thomas Merz’s “Web Publishing with Acrobat-PDF”:
/pdfmark where {pop} {userdict /pdfmark /cleartomark load put} ifelse
[ /Title (mot accenté)
/Author (mot accenté)
/Subject (mot accenté)
/Keywords (mot accenté)
/DOCINFO pdfmark
When you look at the metadata in the resulting pdf, the accented characters turn into “?” in the Subject and Keyword fields, but not the Title and Author fields. The characters are the same ascii 233
I tried replacing them with octal encoding (\351), which came out the same (Title and Author okay, Subject and Keywords messed up).
file encoding is latin-1,unix eol
I found a mention on adobe forums, but the answer didn’t make sense to me.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1165593
and
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/307687
I changed the encoding to utf-8, inserted the characters binarily (in VIM : <Ctrl-v>u00e9), no change. I tried inserting the BOM in a few places, it didn’t work.
This is with the Distiller from Acrobat Pro 9 (9.3.3177)
I didn’t notice this problem with Acrobat Pro 7.
Does anybody know of a workaround to get the accented characters into ALL the metadata fields when modifying a postscript file, or tell me if I’m doing it wrong?
It seems weird that different fields would not accept the same bytes.
Possibly related SO question: Unicode in PDF
I am embedding all fonts.
Can you try using UTF16-BE for the encoding and starting the strings with 254 and 255 (thorn and y-dieresis)?