How to display document metadata

Hay,
What sort of attributes are you interested in exposing?
If their not attributes that will be inserted by the user (in which case simply use columns\site columns;content types), you can use a workflow (I think that a sharepoint designer WF will do the work), if not you can use a visual studio workflow or an event handler to copy attributes to columns which you will preserve for that purpose.

Hope I was helpful.