PrivatePDF

Bookmarks that survive editing

Merge five bookmarked reports in almost any tool and you get one report with no bookmarks at all — and nothing tells you. The navigation of a long document is the first thing a merge destroys and the last thing anyone checks.

or drop a file anywhere on this panel

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How it works

  1. 01Open the PDF, or several to merge.
  2. 02Choose whether to keep the existing bookmarks, build one per page, or remove them.
  3. 03Reorder or delete pages freely — the bookmarks follow.
  4. 04Export.

Why merging normally loses them

A PDF's outline is a separate structure that points at pages; it is not part of the pages themselves. The libraries almost every browser-based PDF tool is built on copy pages and nothing that points at them, so the outline is left behind. This one rebuilds it, entry by entry, against wherever the pages actually ended up.

They follow the pages

Move page forty to the front and its bookmark moves with it. Delete a page and only that page's bookmark goes. Bookmarks are re-resolved against the current page order every time you change it, rather than being copied once and left to rot.

Deleting a title page does not delete a chapter

If you remove the page a heading pointed at, that heading is dropped — but the sub-headings under it are kept and promoted up a level. They still point at pages that are still in the document, and losing an entire chapter's navigation because one page went is not what anyone meant.

It tells you what it is about to drop

If some bookmarks point at pages you have removed, the panel says how many will be lost before you export. A silent drop is indistinguishable from a clean export until someone opens the file a week later.

One per page, from a template

For a document with no outline at all — a scan, an export from a design tool — you can generate one entry per page from a template like "Page {n}". It is not a substitute for real headings, but it makes a two-hundred-page document navigable in one click.

Questions

Can I rename or reorder individual bookmarks?
Not yet. Right now you can keep them, rebuild them per page, or remove them. Editing individual entries is the obvious next step and is not built.
What happens if I use pages per sheet as well?
Each bookmark moves to the sheet its page landed on. It is the only meaning it can still have once four pages share a sheet.
Does Sanitize remove bookmarks?
It can, and if you ask for both, sanitizing wins. Someone asking to strip a document's structure is asking for less, and that should beat asking to keep the navigation.