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hpr2667 :: Create PDF bookmarks with Pdftk

Basic intro to a few pdftk functions

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Hosted by Klaatu on Tuesday, 2018-10-23 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
pdf. 3.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2667

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Duration: 00:21:53

general.

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

Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2018-10-23 18:09:38 by b-yeezi

gcj deprecated

It's a shame that PDFtk is basically going away because the GCJ runtime has been deprecated by most major distros. PDFTK still lives on as a Snap. Also, there is a fork that uses openJDK instead. You can reference this Stack Overflow post:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1028522/how-can-i-install-pdftk-in-ubuntu-18-04-bionic

Comment #2 posted on 2018-10-24 00:59:02 by Clinton Roy

debian

I'm rather confused about why there's a reliance on any particular java runtime, but at least on debian, if i request pdftk to be installed, pdftk-java is installed, and yeah, no screwing around required.

Comment #3 posted on 2018-10-31 09:18:23 by Klaatu

Thanks for the snap tip

I install and use pdftk on Slackware, so far without any issue. It's good to know about its availability in snap packages, though...just in case.

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