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kwsp/Add "outline" to a PDF file.md

Last active November 6, 2021 04:38
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Add outline/bookmark to a PDF file for easy navigation.
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Add "outline" to a PDF file.md

Add "outline" to a PDF file

Install pdftk

Dump the metadata of the pdf file:

pdftk [pdf_to_update] dump_data_utf8 > meta.txt

If the book already contains some bookmarks, it will look something like

...
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: 11. Diffuse Optical Tomography
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 262
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: 11.1. Introduction
BookmarkLevel: 2
BookmarkPageNumber: 262
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: 11.2. Modes of Diffuse Optical Tomography
BookmarkLevel: 2
BookmarkPageNumber: 262
...

Scrape the TOC for the file from some official source and convert into the format above with a custom script. Add this back into the meta.txt file.

Finally, dump the metadata back into the PDF.

pdftk [pdf_to_update] update_info_utf8 meta.txt output [updated_pdf]
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