Extract TOC of PDF?

Question

I am extracting a pdf into images / swf and text with the help of SWFTools and XPDF.. I am running these in a PDF script.

But now I am trying to go one step further and try to get the TOC from the PDF is it possible to extract this information?

Answer 1

I found this with a little bit of searching. It looks rather promising.

PDFMiner: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/index.html

Note: The tool is Python based, but you should be able to use the tool via shell access. Alternatively, you may be able to glean some useful info from the source code itself, as the project is open source.

From the Site:

dumppdf.py

dumppdf.py dumps the internal contents of a PDF file in pseudo-XML format. This program is primarily for debugging purposes, but it's also possible to extract some meaningful contents (such as images).

Examples:

$ dumppdf.py -a foo.pdf
(dump all the headers and contents, except stream objects)

$ dumppdf.py -T foo.pdf
(dump the table of contents)

$ dumppdf.py -r -i6 foo.pdf > pic.jpeg
(extract a JPEG image)

Answer 2

I tried dump.pdf -T, but it did not work on some PDF files.

There is another tool from MuPDF named mutool, which I just found. I don't know if this is better than dump.pdf but worked on a PDF file dump.pdf throws an error.

Here's how to extract TOC with mutool

mutool show {your-pdf-file} outline

MuPDF

Answer 3

Alternatively, you can use MuPDF which is a pretty lightweight but complete PDF implementation written C. In the apps/ subdirectory you will find some tools which can view, dump and extract information from PDF files. I'd prefer MuPDF over xpdf because it is actively maintained and has better PDF support.

Otherwise, there's always Poppler which is actually based upon xpdf. The developers ported its code to C++. Hence, it's performs worse than its predecessor. Compared to MuPDF, Poppler seems to have slightly more features, but in return the code is much more complex.

For your purposes MuPDF should be sufficient though. You could hack together a simple application from the example code provided in apps/ that extracts all the information you need without relying on external applications.

Answer 4

I think looking at PHP's PDFLib would be a very good place to start. If you scroll down, you will see plenty of user-posted solutions for converting PDF to HTML or PDF to Text. After conversion, a relatively simple match function could extract the tagged TOC items and throw them into an array for example, which you can then manipulate as you please.

This StackOverflow post also has some more solutions.

Hope this helps.