Printing a document's Bookmarks

Bookmarks are the most fundamental way of navigating through a PDF document. You need the full version of Acrobat to create Bookmarks. Bookmarks are displayed in a side-panel on the left of your document view window. When you click on a Bookmark you are instantly transported to the the bookmarked page.

How do Bookmarks come into play for attorneys? Lots of ways, but here is one scenario that comes up a lot in a litigation practice.

The usual drill for a paralegal to scan a batch of discovery documents in as one lump file and then bookmark the beginning pages of each document. Having one lump file makes it easier to scroll through a bunch of documents (i.e. if you scanned each document in as a separate file then you'd have to be opening new files for every document you wanted to look at, and no one has the patience for that). And bookmarking the first page of each document makes it easy to navigate to a document that you need to look at.

So let's say you've scanned in a bunch of documents and you have lots of nicely organized bookmarks that list the names of the documents that you have scannned in. What happens if you want to print out a list of your bookmarks? That's how you would get an inventory of the documents that you have in that file, right?

Well, unfortunately, you can't generate a list of PDF bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat without a third-party plug-in program. I don't understand why Acrobat doesn't have this feature. But if you're interested in a third-party plug-in, AppliGent has a $99 program called APGetBookmarks that dynamically gets a list of all bookmarks within PDF documents and reports them back in text form. The plug-in will do the following:

- list the Bookmarks in the PDF document in a Numbered and Indented Hierarchy
- list the corresponding Page Numbers for each Bookmark
- list the Full Path in the Document Hierarchy for Each Bookmark,
- and more...

You can get more info and run an online demo at this link.

Image Solutions has ISIToolBox that does all kinds of things with PDFs and includes a utility to export bookmarks and/or links into a comma separated value (CSV) file data format, which can be imported either into a spreadsheet application or word processor. Unfortunately, this program is quite pricey, at $750. You can get more info and run an online demo for that product at this link.

The down-and-dirty solution to the problem of needing to print out a list of the documents would be to tag the first page of each document with a "Note Comment." Acrobat allows you to print out a summary of the comments, and you can tailor the printout to include only certain comments (i.e. only the Note Comments). But the best solution is probably to use a separate program like CaseMap to keep track of your documents. CaseMap helps you keep track of more than just documents, and really is an indispensible program. In fact, CaseMap has a plug-in that allows you to integrate your PDF documents into a case database in CaseMap. But that is a topic for another day.

Comments

[cmer]

Adding to what has already been said, many commercial tools are available that automatically add bookmarks to PDF files in number of ways and thus facilitate the overall workflow. One such tool that I know of is BMK Application Suite from kapsware.com. A free evaluation copy is also available at their site. May be this could further help many of us. Has anyone else tried it before? Any thoughts on this?

[lee]

Traction Software has released a new bookmark printing tool called 'PDF Bookmark Print' for easy printing of bookmarks from a tree view, also includes index printing of selected bookmarks.

download the free trial from: http://www.traction-software.co.uk/pdfbookmarkprint/index.html