booky

This script creates bookmarks of a pdf from a simple text file. The tool pdftk can already do this in fact internally I am using that tool itself. But pdftk requires a format which is too tedious to write. So I have written this script to enter bookmarks data in a simple format.

Dependencies

• bash
• python3
• pdftk
• dirname
• basename
• GNU sed (OSX users take note, you may have BSD sed. Install gsed instead)

Bookmark format

• Every level starts with a { on a separate line.

• Bookmarks have title with page number separated by comma.

• Both title and page number should be on the same line.

• All these are equivalent (i.e. the script is whitespace agnostic).

  title1, 1
  title1,             1
        title1     ,         1
  

  Example

  {
    Title1, 1
    Title2, 2
    {
      Subtitle1, 3
      Subtitle2, 4
      {
        SubSubtitle1, 5
        ...
      }
    }
  }
  

How To Use it?

• First clone this repository and change your directory. Execute this in a terminal

  git clone https://github.com/SiddharthPant/booky.git
  cd booky
  

• Now copy your pdf file to this directory

• Create a new text file and write your bookmarks in the given format

• Now your directory should contain 4 files: booky.sh, booky.py, your_pdf_file.pdf, your_text_file.txt

• Write the following commands in the terminal

  ./booky.sh your_pdf_file.pdf your_text_file.txt
  

If you add the booky directory to the environment PATH like:

export PATH=/path_to_the_booky:$PATH

then it can run from any directory:

  booky.sh your_pdf_file.pdf your_text_file.txt

This creats a new pdf file your_pdf_file_new.pdf with your bookmarks.

This is going to work in POSIX systems, but if instead you are on a Windows machine. Then first install python3 and pdftk just use the booky.py file in the repo to convert bkmrks.txt to pdftk compatible format

python3 booky.py < bkmrks.txt > output.txt

use the export command to generate a dumped data file.

pdftk C:\Users\Sid\Desktop\doc.pdf dump_data output C:\Users\Sid\Desktop\doc_data.txt

Remove the previous bookmarks from that file and insert content of output.txt instead using a simple copy & paste. And then import that data back.

pdftk C:\Users\Sid\Desktop\doc.pdf update_info C:\Users\Sid\Desktop\doc_data.txt output C:\Users\Sid\Desktop\updated.pdf

If this does not update your bookmarks check that your pdftk version is greater than 1.45