HPR2667: Create PDF bookmarks with Pdftk

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

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