Can LO build a TOC from a PDF file?

users
#1

Hello,

This PDF file
<https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/download_code_pdf.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006074228&dlType=pdf>
has no Table of Contents, and I was wondering if LO could grab all the
headers and build a TOC.

Thank you.

#2

Hello Gilles,

Hello,

This PDF file
<https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/download_code_pdf.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006074228&dlType=pdf>
has no Table of Contents, and I was wondering if LO could grab all the
headers and build a TOC.

In order to create a PDF with a TOC/index you'll have to set heading styles to the appropriate paragraphs.

Opening a PDF with LibO won't go anywhere as the tool for that is Draw which can't set styles for a text processor.

I can't see a way to do that quickly, I'm afraid: a copy/paste from the PDF document to Writer is possible but you'll have to fix a lot of things (eg. useless carriage returns) and apply heading styles by hand. On a 400+ pages document this a big PITA.

Hopefully someone else will come with brighter ideas.

Bien cordialement,

#3

​You want brighter ideas? Say no more!

So... hmm... I'm afraid there won't be many fully-automated tools that can
build a TOC for you. A PDF basically contains a lot of individual elements,
that are arranged to look like ​something coherent.
From the document you linked, it could theoretically be possible to write a
tool that split every pages, grab the raw text, use a regex to find actual
titles, build a TOC, and inject it in the PDF. This would assume:
- Text extraction works correctly (it's not always the case with PDF)
- Titles always follow the same format

But on this kind of document, you could definitely get some acceptable
results. I experimented a bit. The output is here:
http://www.cjoint.com/c/GGjw0OtPkGc
And for the curious, the "script" I used is here:
​https://pastebin.com/icQSZxQr

As you'll see, it is VERY specific to this document, ​but it is possible to
do something.

#4

There is a round-about way of doing this using Nuance's PDF Converter, but
I have not used it since I abandoned Windows® several years ago. With the
PDF Converter, one can make a Word file which could be read by LO, then
use LO's Insert ToC tool and export the result back to PDF.

Gordon

Tauranga N.Z.

#5

Thanks much everyone. I naively thought it could simply be done by converting
the PDF into text in LO, and run a few regexes to build a TOC :-/