Need To Rename PDF Files Medical Manuscripts Which Come To Me With Numbers Only Using Automator

Do you let these PDF accumulate in your Downloads folder, or do you ad hoc move them to another folder, where there may be sub-folders representative of various organizational naming categories (e.g. Disease or drug or whatever)?

Automator has a PDF library action named Get PDF Metadata where you can select the Title (and nothing else), or also tell it to write input filename too. When you select a PDF, it is passed into the Get PDF Metadata action, and the results of the latter action are 1) the PDF filename, and 2) the title string — both as list items.

The action following the Get Metadata, just needs to know the order of those list items, and use the Title to rename the PDF file that is also passed into it.

What specific metadata do you want to rename a given PDF?

From Dock : Launchpad : Other, open Script Editor.

Copy and paste the following into the Script Editor, click the hammer icon, and then click run. It will display all of the document Attributes as metadata in a dialog as shown in the subsequent image.

use framework "Cocoa"
use framework "Quartz"
use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite 10.10 or later
use scripting additions

property NSURL : a reference to current application's NSURL
property PDFDocument : a reference to current application's PDFDocument

set apdf to POSIX path of (choose file of type "com.adobe.pdf" default location (path to desktop))

set furl to NSURL's fileURLWithPath:apdf
set pdf to PDFDocument's alloc()'s initWithURL:furl
set pdf_vers to pdf's majorVersion() & "." & pdf's minorVersion()

set pdf_attrib to pdf's documentAttributes()
set key_array to pdf_attrib's allKeys() as list
set val_array to pdf_attrib's allValues() as list
set out_fmt to "Pages : " & pdf's pageCount & return & "Vers  : " & pdf_vers & return

repeat with i from 1 to count of key_array
	set out_fmt to out_fmt & "Key    : " & (item i of key_array) & return & "Value : " & (item i of val_array) & return
end repeat
display dialog out_fmt
return



Patrick,

Are these PDF medical manuscripts stored in a folder, or a folder hierarchy containing sub-folders? When you say "Arrive" — explain the process by which you want to process these PDF. Renaming them in place is simple enough using the PDF Title metadata, but how the PDF are accessed is important. What fall back approach should be taken if the Title metadata field is empty?

This is going to require more finesse than the available Automator actions, and probably some custom scripting, though nothing elaborate.

What happens to the PDF once they are renamed, or they simply renamed in place in the QXRead folder? The disposition of the renamed files is important to a thorough solution.

It is late here, more in the morning.

The point of the preceding script was to give you insight into the available metadata fields in one of your arbitrary PDF, so we can arrive at what information should be used from metadata field(s) to construct the filename that replaces the original integer filename.

You are welcome. Keyword: Healthy. You too.