Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

[glenleslie]

I have a PDF document where the Table of Contents page does not reference a page number but a specific code for each multipage document bound into the large (420 page) document.

in other words the front 4 pages have a long list of entries like this:

L001 - Document 1 Title
L002 - Document 2 Title
L003 - Document 3 Title
....
L201 - Document 201 Title
.....
L325 - Document 325 Title

Is there some way to easily link these lines so that one can click on the Lxxx entry and then jump to the page down in the document? I'm fine with building a list of the page number where each Lxxx document is in the PDF ... just don't see a good way to automate the connection of a clickable area to the page number where the target document resides.

I tried in PDF-Xchange but their linking capability is very cumbersome. It's at least 10 clicks per line to link these things (the application really wants you to link a specific place on the target page. This means not only generating the link with all of it's clicks but then using their very poor editor to select the target location on the page-- might be good for a dozen or so links in a document but not 100s). All I really need is some way to associate a link to another page in the document with the tag which is associated with each entry.

p.s. is this still the "quick(est) and easy(est)" way to create bookmarks in a PDF? Bookmarks seem like some sort of Adobe relic to me. https://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewto ... 972#p15972 Destinations seem a lot cleaner but even tools like PDF-Xchange don't support an easy mass import of Destinations that I can tell?

[dpc]

You might also want to post your question here: MobileRead PDF forum

[glenleslie]

Talked with another contact. They were able to do this easily with a professional package called Bluebeam. Of course, it's a $400/year subscription so it's not for me. They were able to process the document I wanted done.

If I have to do this again, I might check into PDF Link Editor. I don't know anything about this company... is it scam/malware? Who knows...

http://pdflinkeditor.com/index.html

[cday]

If I have to do this again, I might check into PDF Link Editor. I don't know anything about this company... is it scam/malware? Who knows...

http://pdflinkeditor.com/index.html

I don't see any particular reason to be suspicious, if you Google it in quotes it is mentioned by reasonably well-known sources, and the Freemium sales model with a free version and a more extensive paid version, is widely used by legitimate businesses.

[rkomar]

I have added bookmarks to existing PDFs using either ghostscript or pdfbeads. In either case, you have to provide the bookmark data yourself rather than have it automatically gleaned from the scanned images. It usually is a few hours work for complicated documents. However, if you only have one document, and the alternative is spending $450 for a program to do it, it may be worth your while to do the work by hand. Just google "ghostscript pdfmarks" to find many sites describing the necessary steps.