Merge pdf files and automatically create a table of contents with each file as an entry

mergepdfpoppler

I have several pdf files (chapter1.pdf, chapter2.pdf, etc.), each one being a chapter of a book. I now how to merge them into a single pdf (I use the command pdfunite from poppler), but since the output file is big, it's difficult to find a chapter without having them indexed in a table of contents. So how to create an embedded table of contents in which each merged chapter is an entry?

Note that I do not want to create a page in the output file which contains the list of chapters and their respective page numbers. I want the index/table of contents metadata of an pdf file, that can be browseable in any pdf reader's (or ebook device's) which supports such feature.

Best Answer

A function I use all the time to do exactly this. Just make sure the pdfs sort properly in sequence in the expansion.

tp="/tmp/tmp.pdf"
td="/tmp/data"
for i in *.pdf; do
    echo "Bookmarking $i"
    printf "BookmarkBegin\nBookmarkTitle: %s\nBookmarkLevel: 1\nBookmarkPageNumber: 1\n" "${i%.*}"> "$td"
    pdftk "$i" update_info "$td" output "$tp"
    mv "$tp" "$i"
done
pdftk *.pdf cat output myBook.pdf

Related Solutions

Merge PDF Files – Start Each on Odd Page Number

The PyPdf library makes this sort of things easy if you're willing to write a bit of Python. Save the code below in a script called pdf-cat-even (or whatever you like), make it executable (chmod +x pdf-cat-even), and run it as a filter (./pdf-cat-even a.pdf b.pdf >concatenated.pdf). You need pyPdf ≥1.13 for the addBlankPage method.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import copy, sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
output = PdfFileWriter()
output_page_number = 0
alignment = 2           # to align on even pages
for filename in sys.argv[1:]:
    # This code is executed for every file in turn
    input = PdfFileReader(open(filename))
    for p in [input.getPage(i) for i in range(0,input.getNumPages())]:
        # This code is executed for every input page in turn
        output.addPage(p)
        output_page_number += 1
    while output_page_number % alignment != 0:
        output.addBlankPage()
        output_page_number += 1
output.write(sys.stdout)

Generate a hyperlinked table of contents and insert into existing PDF

This is taken in whole from @Herbert answering a very similar question on the TeX StackExchange:

Adding Table of Contents to existing PDF

use package pdfpages and then:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents
\clearpage\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{The first section name}% or chapter
\includepdf[pages={1-10},linktodoc,linktodocfit=/Fit]{texte/dtk/dtk11-1/komoedie.pdf}
\clearpage\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{The second section name}% or chapter
\includepdf[pages={11-19},linktodoc,linktodocfit=/Fit]{texte/dtk/dtk11-1/komoedie.pdf}
\clearpage\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{The third section name}% or chapter
\includepdf[pages={20-29},linktodoc,linktodocfit=/Fit]{texte/dtk/dtk11-1/komoedie.pdf}
\clearpage\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{The forth section name}% or chapter
\includepdf[pages={21-39},linktodoc,linktodocfit=/Fit]{texte/dtk/dtk11-1/komoedie.pdf}

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Merge PDF Files – Start Each on Odd Page Number

Generate a hyperlinked table of contents and insert into existing PDF

Related Question