Often, I want to add the table of contents of a PDF document as bookmarks to the file. Most existing tools to do this use a GUI which, for me, is tedious and ineffecient.
I have found it much easier to simply edit the bookmarks I want in a text file using vim, and then use this tool to add them to the PDF file.
Once you have a bookmarks file you can use:
$ python __main__.py set-toc -t bookmarks.toc -i input.pdf -o output.pdf
which will produce a file output.pdf with the added bookmarks.
Use
$ python __main__.py dump -p path/to/file.pdf
to print the bookmarks in the appropriate format to stdout.
Each line in the bookmarks file must have the form:
<depth> <title> <page num>
The depth must be an integer which starts at 0 and only increases by one. The title is the bookmark title. The last column must be an integer representing the page number in the PDF file.
PDF bookmarks can be nested. For example its possible to structure bookmarks like this:
bookmark 1
bookmark 1.1
bookmark 1.2
bookmark 1.2.1
bookmark 1.2.2
bookmark 2
The depth encodes the nesting of the bookmarks. It must start at 0 and can only increase by one in each line, but can decrease by any amount. The bookmarks in the above example would be formatted like this:
0 bookmark 1 1
1 bookmark 1.1 1
1 bookmark 1.2 2
2 bookmark 1.2.1 2
2 bookmark 1.2.1 3
0 bookmark 2 4
I have run into issues where PDF files are formatted in such a way that gives some errors when attempting to add bookmarks to them. A possible troubleshooting step in this case is to run:
$ python __main__.py clean -i input.pdf -o output.pdf
to clean up the file. Then running set-toc with output.pdf
may work.