Dhrubajyoti Ghosh

Creating bookmarks in PDFs

Nobody likes having PDFs with no bookmarks (or an index as you might call it), but that won't be a problem any more! All we need is the pdftk utility (it has a ton of other uses as well).

Suppose the PDF we're working with is called foo.pdf. Enter the following line in a terminal


pdftk foo.pdf dump_data output bookmark.txt

This will create a file called bookmark.txt containing various data about foo.pdf. Now open bookmark.txt using your favorite editor, and insert the following piece of code at the top (or bottom):


BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: Page Cover
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 1

Exit the editor and enter


pdftk foo.pdf update_info bookmark.txt output bookmarked.pdf

If we open bookmarked.pdf, we'll see the contents of foo.pdf but this time there's a bookmark section with the entry "Page Cover" pointing to page 1. You can continue to add more bookmarks as you deem necessary.

Note: As far as I know, there's also a GUI version of pdftk, but I've never tried it out.