I'm using Acrobat Professional 9.0 (CS3) for Mac to edit the metadata for a collection of PDFs to be made available on the web. When I enter the data, I am inputting a list of authors separated by commas, like this: Smith J, Watson C, Brown J. If I click on "Additional metadata", the data I've already entered is transposed into the various XMP fields. And the commas separating the author names are changed to semi-colons. I gather that this happens because XMP wants to separate multiple authors with semi-colons, and Acrobat wants the metadata in XMP fields to match the metadata stored for the file properties. Fine.

However, if I save such a PDF and then use Get Info on my Mac (OSX 10.4) to look at the file properties, the list of authors is now truncated where the first semi-colon appears. The list is also truncated in Windows XP if I right-click and select properties. The list is also truncated when I look at the file properties in Preview on my Mac, or if I look at file properties using FoxIT, or using Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 or earlier. The only way a site visitor will actually be able to view the full list of authors in a file saved this way is to use Adobe Reader version 8 or later.

I would like to preserve XMP/Dublin Core/etc metadata in the proper format in the XMP code, but would also like users of standard, popular file viewers to be able to access the full list of authors. Is there a way to do this with Acrobat 9?

Also, once I've saved a file and the XMP metadata has been altered, Acrobat seems to permanently change the way that the authors are listed in the file properties. I cannot manually change those settings any longer without Acrobat overriding my changes and converting commas to semi-colons, or surrounding the entire list of authors in quotation marks. Is there a way to get around these Acrobat overrides and manually take control of my metadata again?

Does Windows Vista read the authors list correctly in the file properties if it is separated by semi-colons?

It seems to me that in an attempt to get XMP metadata working smoothly across the entire CS line, Adobe has jumped the gun somewhat and is now forcing Acrobat users to use "file properties" metadata that is really only fully compatible with Adobe products. Is there a way I can get some backwards compatibility on this?

Thanks for any suggestions or insight anyone can provide to this vexing issue.

Phil.