PDF Outline and Links Research

determining number of pages for each individual PDF document

pdftk agenda.pdf dump_data | grep NumberOfPages

pdftk for outline

1. Create a bookmarks.txt file with your outline/bookmarks definitions:

BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: Agenda
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 1
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: Proclamation #1
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 5

2. Run pdftk command on pdf to add them:

run pdftk input.pdf update_info bookmarks.text ouptut pdf_with_outline.pdf

Finding locations of bounding rectangles for given text:

pdftotext install with:

OSX: brew install poppler LINUX: sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28857418/85359

You can use pdftotext -layout some.pdf some.txt to create a file containing the text from your PDF. (This does not work reliably. Some PDFs, for example those which are missing a valid /ToUnicode table, will not lend themselves readily to text extraction.)

This can lead you to the page number for a match.

Using (with some trial'n'error) pdftotext -f 33 -l 33 -layout -x NN -y MM -W NN -H MM can narrow down the location of your match on page 33 more exactly.

Using pdftotext -layout -bbox -f 33 -l 33 will return the coordinates of the bounding boxes for each word on page 33.

You could use TET, the Text Extraction Toolkit to find the exact coordinates of matching words too. TET can give you the coordinates of individual glyphs even.

Ghostscript (gs) for adding Links:

1. First need to find the location of the Rectangle that you want to draw the link at

Ghostscript Docs Reference

First example:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4674664/85359

gswin32c.exe ^ -o with-hyperlink.pdf ^ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^ -c "[ /Rect [0 425 295 465]" ^ -c " /Border [0 0 2]" ^ -c " /Color [.7 0 0]" ^ -c " /Page 1" ^ -c " /Action <</Subtype /URI" ^ -c " /URI (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4663409/creating-a-pdf-hyperlink-with-postscript/4674664#4674664)>>" ^ -c " /Subtype /Link" ^ -c " /ANN pdfmark" ^ -f without-hyperlink.pdf

Second example:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/12884081/85359

-o output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress original.pdf script.ps

Postscript code saved in script.ps:

[ /Rect [10 10 50 50]
/Page 2
/SrcPg 1
/Subtype /Link
/ANN pdfmark

pdfmarks to add Outline or Links

pdfmark Primer ^ Search for 'pdfmark Primer' (chapter 6) ^

Adobe pdfmark Reference Doc

pdfmark Recipes Ebook

adding bookmarks to pdfs with pdfmark

[ /Title (Some Bookmark)
  /Page 2
  /Count 1
  /View [/XYZ null null 0]
  /OUT pdfmark

gs -o [outputfilename] -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress [originalPDFfilename] [pdfmarkfillename]

pdfmarks (using Ghostscript) to set "Show Outline View" (TOC) by default

https://thechriskent.com/2017/02/13/applying-pdfmark-to-pdf-documents-using-ghostscript/

https://thechriskent.com/2017/03/06/setting-pdf-view-options-with-pdfmark/

[ /PageMode /UseOutlines
  /Page 1
  /View [/Fit]
  /DOCVIEW pdfmark

gs -o [outputfilename] -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress [originalPDFfilename] [pdfmarkfillename]