Metatron

A small, sharp CLI tool for inspecting, cleaning, and editing PDF metadata.

Install

For use anywhere on your system:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/naghim/metatron

Then restart your shell (or run source ~/.bashrc) so the metatron command is on your PATH.

For local development:

git clone https://github.com/naghim/metatron
cd metatron
uv sync

Usage

View metadata

metatron info document.pdf
metatron info document.pdf --json      # machine-readable output

Clean (strip) all metadata

metatron clean document.pdf                # overwrites in place
metatron clean document.pdf -o clean.pdf   # write to new file
metatron clean document.pdf -y             # skip confirmation

Set metadata fields

metatron set document.pdf --title "My Doc" --author "Me"                        # overwrites in place
metatron set document.pdf -t "Title" -a "Author" -s "Subject" -k "tag1, tag2"   # multiple fields are supported
metatron set document.pdf --creator "metatron" -o updated.pdf                   # write to new file

Compare two PDFs

metatron diff original.pdf cleaned.pdf

Supported Fields

Flag	Field
--title, -t	Title
--author, -a	Author
--subject, -s	Subject
--keywords, -k	Keywords
--creator	Creator application
--producer	Producer application