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Question

Merge PDF with Indexing

May 9, 2014 2:53AM PDT

Hi

I have several PDF's that I want to merge into one large file & then create some sort of indexing or bookmarking capability on the side, similar to this example. I need it for either Windows 8 or Ubuntu 12.04 OS edition. Of course, the software or tool has to be a freeware or at no cost. I don't want to spend money for this case.

Please help me out if there are any.

Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: pdf's
May 9, 2014 5:36AM PDT

I'm afraid it is impossible, even with a paid for program. Most likely your pdf-files are just something like a 'print' to a file. And in that 'printfile' it's not possible for a program to recoglise the headers and such that you want to index or bookmark. You need an editable version to mark those headers. Using the original word processing file would be a good start, but wouldn't allow for making that index with a free program.

However, you can have a look at the pdf toolkit from http://www.pdflabs.com/.
It allows for merging pdf-files and importing bookmarks from a file you have to make yourself. The lay-out is described in http://www.pdflabs.com/blog/export-and-import-pdf-bookmarks/

It seems a lot of work.

Kees

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How about....?
May 9, 2014 11:55PM PDT

How about if the individual files that I want to merge are named "Chapter-1, Chapter-2...."; would that make the bookmarking possible with those labels so that the combined file would have those as nested tree? Or is that also not possible?

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Answer
With a copy of Adobe Acrobat
May 10, 2014 10:13AM PDT

NOT the Reader version, you can join PDF files together, in whatever order you like, and then add all the bookmarks that you want to.

This software is NOT free but it will do what you want


P