adding metadata with ArcPy using export does not appear to work

DeanAnderson2 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:37:43 GMT

Oregon Counties are required to produce PDF's of property taxmaps. We use a tool/python script to produce these pdfs and now must meet CAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility requirements. Using ArcPro 3.6.2, when I use the export tool from the Share Ribbon and add accessibility properties I can create a document that meets accessibility requirements when tested with AdobeAcrobatPro (has PDF metadata). But, when I use python as called from a tool and set the document metadata within the python script it does not give me an error but does not add the metadata to the document.

pdf.title = "Accessor Map" # The accessibility title
pdf.author = "Klamath County GIS"
pdf.subject = "Asessor Map"
pdf.keywords = "Assessor, Klamath, Map, 2026, Taxlots"

However, it appears that other properties such as pdf.includeAccessibilityTags = True work. Am I doing something wrong or is this not available at this time????

Our work around has been to use the pypdf library to meet this requirement as follows (abbreviated code as a function - it works) :

def updatePDFDOC(PDFDoc,MapToPrint):
arcpy.AddMessage("pdatePDFDOC")
reader = PdfReader(PDFDoc)
writer = PdfWriter(clone_from=reader)
writer.root_object.update({NameObject("/Lang"): TextStringObject("en-US")})
title = 'Assessor Map ' + MapToPrint
writer.add_metadata({"/Title": title,
"/Author": "Klamath County Assessor's Office",
"/Subject": "Assessment and Taxation",
"/Keywords": "Klamath County; Assessor's Office; Property Taxes",
"/Lang": "en-US",})

writer.write(PDFDoc)

I would rather use the ESRI tools to get this done. But don't want to waste a lot of time if this capability is not available.

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adding metadata with ArcPy using export does not appear to work