Printing PDF Bookmarks List

I work with PDF a lot, and it bothers me that I can see an outline view when I open the document, but I don’t seem to be able to grab just that view. My presentations are mostly PDF and the titles and section headings show up nicely. Today I figured out how to get an outline view, so I’m putting that information here while I remember how to do it!

I used a tool called pdftk which is excellent, I’ve used it before for doing various other PDF-related things. To grab metadata such as bookmarks, use the dump-data command, like this:

pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data | grep BookmarkTitle > outline.txt

The above line takes all the bookmarks from the PDF (this was a slide deck created using powerdot and LaTeX, the section and slide titles nest appropriately), and outputs a bunch of information about the document and the various PDFs. The grep command just gets the lines containing “BookmarkTitle”, then the whole thing gets written to a file. I cleaned that up and now I have the outline of my course, so I can add timings, notes for the exercises and so on.

2 thoughts on “Printing PDF Bookmarks List

  1. Hi Lorna, where is the text file saved, I can’t find it, or it didn’t actually do it. Are there no requirements for indicating source and output directories?

    • The textfile is at the very end of the command after the “>” – so in this example, the file is “output.txt” in the directory you ran the command from. Hope that helps.

Leave a Reply

Please use [code] and [/code] around any source code you wish to share.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)