PDF generation: Support YAML frontmatter to fill in PDF metadata

Use case or problem

PDFs generated by Obsidian should have a possibility to set their metadata, especially Title, Author, Subject, Keywords and possibly Date.

It makes later indexing, finding, sorting PDFs much easier. (Think of a big company PDF indexing system, or your Ebook managing software, like Calibre.)

With LaTeX, YAML frontmatter can be used for this purpose:

title: My Ttile
author: Alfred E. Newman
subject: Making PDF more usable
keywords: [PDF, searching, metadata, YAML]
date: 2021-03-06

Proposed solution

It would just be great if Obsidian could support at least the above metadata variables and actually write them into the generated PDFs. Maybe they could even be case-insensitive, like Title: and title: meaning the same.

Current workaround (optional)

Manually edit the PDF metadata after generating from Obsidian, using appropriate tools. A tedious and error-prone extra step.

Related feature requests (optional)

7 Likes

I am also very interested in this. Especially with compatibility for LaTeX templates e.g. using pandoc markdown-to-pdf:

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-yaml_metadata_block

1 Like

Any news on that?

When PDFs are imported into citation programs, it is a tremendous relief if the citation program reads the metadata and properly integrates the PDF. The metadata from the Obsidian App should therefore (as described above) be present in exported PDFs, as this would provide a highly professional added value for those, who receive such PDFs.

1 Like