Acrobat Metadata Normalisation

​@Deon S 

You have posted this in the Bridge forum, not the Acrobat forum.

How exactly is this creating problems for a 3rd party DAM system? Each keyword should be read as a separate entry, not as a single string separated by characters.

Is the DAM reading from the subject or legacy IPTC keyword metadata?

Can you provide a link to an example PDF, or screenshots from Acrobat and the DAM as I have done below?

I tested this process by adding keywords in Acrobat Pro to a PDF that didn’t have keywords. I didn’t add any spaces and used both a comma and semi-colon as separators:

After pressing OK, I can see that spaces are added and that the comma separator has been normalised to a semi-colon, however, this is just for display:

This is a better representation of the data in the “Advanced” view, showing the content of the DC:Subject “bag” as three separate, distinct entries:

And here is what ExifTool shows:

I believe that the comma separators are just a convention used for display in ExifTool, whereas Adobe use semi-colons, however, I can’t say why when Acrobat Pro wrote the data to the legacy Keyword metadata that it is displayed with inconistent word spaces compared to the same data written to the preferred Subject metadata (perhaps a bug).

There may be Adobe Bridge and ExifTool or other metadata cleaning methods available if this is a real issue.