Thanks for responding. I suspected that my understanding of metadata was incomplete or inaccurate. As I understand it, the metadata for any given pdf can be found by first opening the pdf; clicking File -> Properties, which opens a dialog box titled "Document Properties". The first tab in the dialog box is "Description" and includes the fields File, Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. The values for these fields are what I'm referring to as metadata. Additionally, from the Document Properties dialog box, clicking on the "Custom" tab allows you to create custom properties and values, which I also considered to be metadata. I have manipulated these fields for a certain pdf as shown in the two screenshots below:
After making this changes, I saved the pdf and closed it. I then navigated to the folder where the pdf is stored using Windows Explorer. As you can in the following screen shot of WE, that the pdf I have made the changes to is the first in the list. The Windows Explorer columns include: Title, Pages, Author, and Subjects, but their values are all blank and fail to show what I have assigned them in the PDF properties (or what I thought was metadata). As for my custom fields, Windows does not give me any kind of option to display those. Windows inability to display something as simple as the number of pages in the PDF is completely baffling to me.
My objective is to be able to modify the standard document properties of a PDF with usable information, those being Title , Author, Subject, and Keywords. I would also like to be able to create the custom properties with additional useful information. I would then like to be able to use a file manager, to view the contents of a folder full of pdfs, similar to the screenshot above, and see the properties and custom field values that i have assigned to the pdfs in columns of the list of pdfs. Windows Explorer is the only file manager I have ever used. It's possible that the solution to my problem could be as simple as changing file managers. It may be that what I'm after is not possible at. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.