Another solution - if your machine have Acrobat (exchange) you can use Win32::OLE module. It is not enough to have Acrobat Reader installed in this case :(

use strict;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const;

my $abat = Win32::OLE->new('AcroExch.App');
my $abdoc = Win32::OLE->new('AcroExch.AVDoc');
$abdoc->Open('d:\Documentation\perl\xtk.pdf','d:\Documentation\perl\xt
+k.pdf');
my $pddoc = $abdoc->GetPDDoc;
print "pp=".$pddoc->GetNumPages,"\n";
for (qw(Title Subject Author)) {
  print "$_:".$pddoc->GetInfo($_),"\n";
}
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Warmest wishes,
Vadim

line use Win32::OLE::Const; remains from my piece of code, it is not needed here

Thanks for your answer, Vadim!

I owe the full Acrobat program but for speed and portability reasons would prefer a pure Perl solution.

pdflib is not under GNU, the other CPAN modules are as far as I've found more suited for PDF creation. I'd love to see PDF.pm corrected therefore. Let's see what the author says.

Best wishes,
Axel.

Rather late on the reply, but I was just doing something similar. I needed to generate an alphabetical index of publications (all PDF) and wanted it in a nice HTML table with other pertinant metadata (pages, creation date, etc.).

What follows is just a bit of cleaned up PDF reading code:

opendir DIR, '.';

my @pdf = sort { $a->{Title} cmp $b->{Title} }
          map  { scalar( get_info($_) )      }
          grep { /\.pdf/i && -f $_           }
          readdir DIR;

sub get_info {
    # Get basic PDF metadata.
    my $file = shift;
    my %info;
    
    my $pdf = PDF->new($file);
    
    return undef unless $pdf->IsaPDF;
    
    $info{Filename} = $file;
    $info{Size}     = -s $file;
    $info{Pages}    = $pdf->Pages;
    for (qw(Title CreationDate ModDate)) {
        $info{$_} = $pdf->GetInfo($_)
    }
    return( wantarray ? %info : \%info );
}
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That opens the current directory and results in an alphabetically sorted (if you wanted it sorted by different criteria just change the sort {} section) array of PDF metadata info hashes. $pdf->[0]{Title} is the title of the first PDF in the array.

print "$_->{Title}\n" for @pdf;
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Will give you a plain text list of all the document titles. If you only want titles just delete all the hash stuff in the sub and return the title scalar only.

#!perl -w
use strict;
use Text::PDF::File;

if (@ARGV) {
    for my $file (@ARGV) {
        if ( -r $file ) { print gettitle($file), "\n" }
    }
}
elsif ( $^O =~ /Mac/ ) {
    chomp( my $pwd = `pwd` );
    my $file = MacPerl::Ask( "Input file:", $pwd );
    if ( -r $file ) { print gettitle($file), "\n" }
}
else {
    die "no input, no output\n";
}

sub gettitle {
    my $pdffile = shift;
    my $pdf     = Text::PDF::File->open($pdffile) || die;
    my $info    = $pdf->{'Info'}->val;
    my $title   = $info->{'Title'}->val;
}
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With the help of Alan Fry I could manage to get a fast solution like this

sub gettitle {
    use Fcntl;
    my $file = shift;
    local *IN;
    sysopen( IN, $file, O_RDONLY, 0 )
      or die "while reading: '$file'\n";
    read IN, my ($str), -s $file;
    close IN;

    my ($info_block) = ( $str =~ /\/Info\s(\d+)\s0\sR/ )
      or die "cannot get /Info paragraph\n";
    my $searchpos = -1;
    my $info_start;
    while (1) {
        $info_start =
          index( $str, "$info_block 0 obj",
            $searchpos + 1 );
        die "cannot get position of '$info_block 0 obj'\n"
          if $info_start < $searchpos + 1;
        last
          if (
            substr( $str, $info_start - 1, 1 ) =~
            /\015|\012/ );
        $searchpos = $info_start;
    }
    my $info_obj = substr( $str, $info_start,
        index( $str, ">>", $info_start ) - $info_start +
          2 );
    my ($title) =
      ( $info_obj =~
          /\/Title\s*\(  ([^\015\012|\015|\012]*)  \)  /x )
      or return 'undefined';
    return $title;
}
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I furthermore compared the performance of the above solution with Text::PDF and PDF-111 from CPAN. The test set consisted of 36 PDF files summing up to 3.8 MB.

runtime ratios of
index-solution-from-above : Text::PDF methods : PDF-111
were:
1 : 6 : 12



PDF-111 from CPAN has other flaws too. The author didn't respond to my questions. IMHO it should be dumped. It has a far to promiment place in the module hierarchy.

I'll grant you PDF has some definite flaws but the above solution does as well unfortunately.

It has trouble with titles that were truncated due to length – it returns them as undefined. There also seems to be some problems with asian languages.

I like the speed and mem use compared to some of the others (about 4× faster than PDF->GetInfo). I need to muck about in the info section for some other stuff hopefully I'll figure out the format for long titles. Thanks.