Jtdylktuy

I have a pdf kinda-book file which has a table of contents as metadata in file but they are not listed on any page of the document. I want to print the file with table of contents, or print the table of contents separately. How can I do that?

pdftk can dump out the "bookmarks" with, e.g., pdftk file.pdf dump_data_utf8; you'll get a bunch of Bookmark* entries buried in the rest of the metadata. grep can give just them:

$ pdftk whatever.pdf dump_data_utf8 | grep ^Bookmark

BookmarkBegin

BookmarkTitle: Cover

BookmarkLevel: 1

BookmarkPageNumber: 1

BookmarkBegin

BookmarkTitle: Agenda

BookmarkLevel: 1

BookmarkPageNumber: 2

The "level" is the indentation level (so a level 2 is indented from a level 1). You can format that into whatever format you want for printing.

Here is a Perl script to print it in LaTeX format, which can then be fed to e.g., pdflatex to get a PDF file (which you could even use pdftk to prepend to your original PDF). Note this is also available at https://gitlab.com/derobert/random-toys/blob/master/pdf/pdftoc-to-latex (which is a good place to send pull requests if you want to improve it):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.024;

use strict;

use warnings qw(all);

use IPC::Run3;

use LaTeX::Encode;

use Encode qw(decode);



my @levels

    = qw(chapter section subsection subsubsection paragraph subparagraph);

my @counters;



my ($data_enc, $data);

run3 ['pdftk', $ARGV[0], 'dump_data_utf8'], undef, $data_enc;

$data = decode('UTF-8', $data_enc, Encode::FB_CROAK);



my @latex_bm;



my $bm;

foreach (split(/n/, $data)) {

    /^Bookmark/ or next;

    if (/^BookmarkBegin$/) {

        add_latex_bm($bm) if $bm;

        $bm = {};

    } elsif (/^BookmarkLevel: (d+)$/a) {

        ++$counters[$1 - 1];

        $#counters = $1 - 1;

        $bm->{number} = join(q{.}, @counters);

        $bm->{level} = $1 - 1;

    } elsif (/^BookmarkTitle: (.+)$/) {

        $bm->{title} = latex_encode($1);

    } elsif (/^BookmarkPageNumber: (d+)$/a) {

        $bm->{page} = $1;

    } else {

        die "Unknown Bookmark tag in $_n";

    }

}

add_latex_bm($bm) if $bm;



print <<LATEX;

\documentclass{report}

\begin{document}

${ join('', @latex_bm) }

\end{document}

LATEX



exit 0;



sub add_latex_bm {

    my $bm     = shift;

    my $level  = $levels[$bm->{level}];

    my $number = $bm->{number};

    my $title  = $bm->{title};

    my $page   = $bm->{page};



    push @latex_bm, <<LINE;

\contentsline {$level}{\numberline {$number}$title}{$page}%

LINE

}

Here is how to use this script:

1. Download https://gitlab.com/derobert/random-toys/raw/master/pdf/pdftoc-to-latex?inline=false and save as pdftoc-to-latex.pl
   


2. Make it executable by running chmod +x /path/to/pdftoc-to-latex.pl in the terminal


3. Install Latex::Encode perl package. On Debian Stretch you can do so via sudo apt install liblatex-encode-perl. On other distros you will probably need to do something else.


4. Run the script like this: /path/to/pdftoc-to-latex.pl /path/to/pdf/file.pdf > /path/to/where/you/want/tex/file.tex
   


5. Compile the resulting tex file to pdf with your favorite LaTeX compiler (e.g., cd /path/to/where/you/want/tex; pdflatex file.tex)