nisus.com

Having tried, I think, every metadata tool available, I'm presently convinced that the safest way to make sure that metadata are preserved with the document in the long-term is to embed them in the document. I've created a glossary entry that inserts a metadata page at the end of the document. It contains a form for title, author, keywords, completion date, synopsis, and distribution record. I have two questions.

First, is there a better way to track metadata? "Better" includes at least (1) minimum hassle in attaching and updating the tags/keywords, (2) reliable hits on the tags by Spotlight and other search tools, and (3) certainty that the metadata will survive as long as the document survives, even if third-party tools come and go.

Second, is there a way to exempt the metadata page from pagination, so that when I insert Pages In Document to produce, say, "Page 1 of 50", the metadata page is not counted?

Thanks,
ydkm

Internally RTF supports metadata like author and keywords, which would be a more appropriate place to store such information. But currently NWP provides no access to such data, and whether this information would be indexed by Spotlight I don't know. Also, all categories of information might not be represented, eg: I don't think there's any support for a synopsis.

You can't exempt any content from the total document page count. However, you could use a section break to separate out the information and then insert the automatic number "pages in section" instead of "pages in document".

TextEdit has a nice ability in the File>Show Properties feature. The tags there are indexed in Spotlight. It would be great if NWP could implement something similar.

Thanks,
dp

+1 for this - for academic peer review, where it's imperative that comments be anonymous, it's useful to be able to check whether a file has any identifying metadata (this is less an issue with documents created in Nisus than in imported files -- I have received "anonymous" review comments which revealed authors' identity in the metadata, though my main concern of course is concealing my own...).