[reportlab-users] Patch for increased standard compliance of /CreationDate

[Tim Roberts]

Dinu Gherman wrote:

> I wrote:

>

>> I noticed the /CreationDate field in the PDFInfo can be made more

>> standard compliant, making it have date values like this:

>>

>>   D:20070929113343-01'00'

>>

>> instead of the current fields like:

>>

>>   20070929113343

>>

>> [...]

>

> Any comment on this? From all the PDFs on my disks only ReportLab

> seems to ommit the "D:" prefix, while some other producers sometimes

> also ommit the timezone information...


I found quite an entertaining variety of formats for this field.  No one
must actually look at it:

Acrobat Distiller 3.0 for Solaris:
/CreationDate (D:191000427125121)

(That's actually a Y2K bug; it was produced in April of 2000, rendered
as "19100".)

Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Windows:
/CreationDate (D:20010717001214)

Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh:
/CreationDate(D:20050610112850Z)

Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5:
/CreationDate (D:20050511163757-07'00')
/ModDate (D:20050511163757-07'00')

Acrobat Distiller 8.1.0:
/CreationDate(D:20070928144339-07'00')
/ModDate(D:20070928144339-07'00')

deskPDF 2.5:
/CreationDate(D:20071003230434)

GNU Ghostscript 7.05:
/CreationDate(11/4/2004 9:27:6)

GPL Ghostscript 8.54:
/CreationDate(D:20070821001140-07'00')

ReportLab:
/CreationDate (20050722111110)

Personally, I would agree that the D: seems a reasonable addition.

-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.