Re: PDF author metadata

[Anthony Youngman]

On 07/07/16 08:38, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
> On 07/07/2016 02:23 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Federico Bruni <address@hidden> writes:
> > > Who should be in your opinion the author of a LilyPond score PDF? The
> > > composer or the typesetter?
> >
> > Usefulness does not come into play here as long as there is a standard.
> > The PDF standard states:
> >
> > Key          Type        Value
> > Author       text string (Optional) The name of the person who 
> > created the document.
>
> “[T]he person who created the document” is extremely ambiguous. Is 
> “the document” the composition, the score, the arrangement... ?  The 
> philosophers with whom I work can (and do!) spend years debating these 
> things.

None of those. The document is the computer file. If I hit "new" in MS 
Word, it is my name that gets plonked in the "author" field of *that* 
document. The fact that I *may* be copying *another* document is 
irrelevant - what I am copying is something else - a different document. 
I created the current document, I am the author. (Unfortunately, the 
word author implies creativity, but then, they did create the document :-)
> The shortest realistic answer is that whoever creates the PDF decides 
> who the “author” of that PDF is; if they don’t care enough to credit 
> someone else, then it’s them, or no one at all.
Sounds like they should have used the word "scribe", not "author". Only 
snag is, they would then have had people asking "what is a scribe?". But 
think of a shaman dictating a story to a western collector. The shaman 
is the story-teller, the westerner (the scribe) is the author of the book.

Cheers,
Wol