HPR2667: Create PDF bookmarks with Pdftk

Hacker Public Radio

Pdftk is a command that lets you manipulate PDFs outside of a GUI PDF creation tool. There are several GUI tools you can use to create PDFs with valid bookmarks and other fancy features, but pdftk is often more convenient.

Extract pages 1 through 2, and pages 5-21, and page 261 from a big PDF into a new PDF:

 $ pdftk big.pdf cat 1-2 5-21 261 output small.pdf 

Extract bookmarks from original PDF:

 $ pdftk big.pdf dump_data output book.mark 

Here is what a bookmark file looks like:

 InfoBegin InfoKey: ModDate InfoValue: D:20181010181951-05'00' InfoBegin InfoKey: CreationDate InfoValue: D:20181010181934-05'00' InfoBegin InfoKey: Creator InfoValue: pdftk (Linux) InfoBegin InfoKey: Producer InfoValue: pdftk 2.02-x86_64 PdfID0: d8deadbeeff34211ba60d80fda7611da PdfID1: 39186170c6134566884b79c0ffee7d59 NumberOfPages: 261 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Cover BookmarkLevel: 1 BookmarkPageNumber: 1 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Credits BookmarkLevel: 1 BookmarkPageNumber: 2 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Chapter One BookmarkLevel: 1 BookmarkPageNumber: 3 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Foo Section BookmarkLevel: 2 BookmarkPageNumber: 5 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Bar Baz BookmarkLevel: 3 BookmarkPageNumber: 7 BookmarkBegin BookmarkTitle: Back cover BookmarkLevel: 1 BookmarkPageNumber: 19 

Apply the bookmark data back to the PDF:

 $ pdftk small.pdf update_info book.mark output final.pdf