PDF-Bookmark is a tool for importing and exporting pdf bookmark with the bmk format.

$ pip install pdf-bookmark

pdf-bookmark utilizes PDFtk and Ghostscript to export and import pdf bookmarks. They must be installed before running pdf-bookmark.

PDFtk is used here to export bookmark from pdf file. The java port pdftk-java may also be OK.

On Arch Linux, pdftk-java could be installed by:

$ sudo pacman -S pdftk java-commons-lang

Verify the installation:

$ pdftk --version

Ghostscript is used here to import bookmark to pdf file.

On Arch Linux, it could be installed by:

$ sudo pacman -S ghostscript

Verify the installation:

$ gs --version

The bmk format is used to describe the bookmark of a pdf file. It will be used to import bookmark into a pdf file.

bmk format is easy to write. It looks quite like the content of a book. So you can copy the content and modify from it.

Each line represents a bookmark item. The title and the page number are separated by at least 4 dots ".".

The level of a bookmark is specified by the indentation of spaces. The default indentation is 2 spaces, and the number of spaces could be configured with inline command.

This is a simple example of a bmk file.

序................1
Chapter 1................4
Chapter 2................5
  2.1 Section 1................6
    2.1.1 SubSection 1................6
    2.1.2 SubSection 2................8
  2.2 Section 2................12
Chapter 3................20
Appendix................36

Import the bookmark and create a new pdf file:

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -b bookmark.bmk -o new.pdf

The bmk format could also be exported from a pdf file with bookmark. You may also modify the bookmark from the exported one.

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf

There could also be inline commands in the file to do more controls on the bookmark. These commands start with !!! and modify some properties of bookmark. The new property will affect bookmarks after the line until it is changed again.

It is normal that the main body of a pdf file does not start from the first page of pdf, and the page number is not always arabic.

!!! collapse_level = 2

!!! num_style = Roman
Preface................I
Content................IV

!!! new_index = 12
!!! num_style = Arabic
Introduction................1
Chapter 1................4
Chapter 2................5
  2.1 Section 1................6
  2.2 Section 2................7
Chapter 3................10
Appendix................11

With these inline commands, you do not need to recalculate the index number for each page.

Here are all supported inline commands:

• new_index. Default: 1. The following bookmark index will be recalculated from the new index number (new_index + page - 1).
• num_start. Default: 1. Specify the number of first page if it does not start from 1 (new_index + page - num_start).
• num_style. Default: Arabic. The page number style. Could be Arabic, Roman and Letters.
• collapse_level. Default: 0. On which level the bookmarks are collapsed. 0 means expand all.
• level_indent. Default: 2. Number of indentation spaces for a new level.

The pdf-bookmark command is installed by pip install pdf-bookmark.

usage: pdf-bookmark [-h] [-f {bmk,none,pdftk,pdfmark,json}]
                    [-l COLLAPSE_LEVEL] [-b BOOKMARK] [-p PDF] [-o OUTPUT_PDF]

Import and export PDF bookmark

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f {bmk,none,pdftk,pdfmark,json}, --format {bmk,none,pdftk,pdfmark,json}
                        the output format of bookmark
  -l COLLAPSE_LEVEL, --collapse-level COLLAPSE_LEVEL
                        the min level to be collapsed, 0 to expand all
  -b BOOKMARK, --bookmark BOOKMARK
                        the bookmark file to be imported
  -p PDF, --pdf PDF     the input PDF file
  -o OUTPUT_PDF, --output-pdf OUTPUT_PDF
                        the output PDF file

This will import the bmk bookmark into a pdf file:

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -b bookmark.bmk -o new.pdf

If you would like to have a quite output:

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -b bookmark.bmk -f none -o new.pdf

This will export the bmk bookmark to stdout from a pdf file:

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf

The output format could be changed to pdfmark, json:

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -f pdfmark
$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -f json

This will only change the collapse level of the pdf.

$ pdf-bookmark -p input.pdf -l 2 -o new.pdf