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

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

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

Post by dpc »

You might also want to post your question here: MobileRead PDF forum
glenleslie
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

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

Post by cday »

glenleslie wrote: 08 Oct 2022, 13:04 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
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by 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.
TDavLinguist
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by TDavLinguist »

jpdfbookmarks is the tool you want. It not only adds a TOC to the PDF, but can also allow indenting (for subsections) and panning/zooming to the exact area of a page where the section starts. I added a few indexes to Index-less PDFs (scanned and digital) with this.
BruceG
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by BruceG »

In reading these posts, I wonder why create a TOC when one can just search one or many PDF's at the same time. I scanned a series of magazines that someone made an paper index for each year. Once OCRed a index was created with Acrobat for the complete set, any word or phrases could be searched for instead of going to a particular year and look at the paper index and hope you got the year right. Every year the new magazines are added and new index created. Clicking on a result of a search goes to that place in the PDF.
Doing a TOC for a newspaper would limit the items to be ones person's choice but a index of every word allows searching for anything. This also depends how good the OCR is and if any editing is done.
I also do volunteer work at a Archive, our current index of digital material has 1137 files with 178227 pages covering newspapers, minute books, letters, reports etc. There are individual Indexes for say newspaper, but there is this larger one for everything.
rkomar
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by rkomar »

Indexes and tables of contents are not the same thing. There is a good reason why many technical books have both. The table of contents gives you a summary of how the information is laid out, as well as directions on how to find each section. It is a big picture view of what the document is about. You don't get that at all from an index.
BruceG
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by BruceG »

Thanks for that. Manuals and technical books are ones that I have not scanned. People, places, events, opinions are what I scan, are used for.
Thanks again for the explanation.
Konos93a
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Re: Table of Contents: adding links to an existing TOC in a PDF?

Post by Konos93a »

https://handyoutlinerfo.sourceforge.net/
i use this if abbyfinereader dont make good job

i just copy them and make the right format from the book page with the table of contents .
koreader show when chapter ends or change so this is necessary there .
because in an ebookreader u dont know at how many page u should read to end the chapter.
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