unfolding disasters/ posts/ PDF bookmarks with Ghostscript

I was recently trying to add bookmarks to a PDF I'd generated with pdftk. It turns out to be fairly simple to add bookmarks to a PDF using Ghostscript, following maggoteer's post to the Ubuntu forums. The syntax is:

$ gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in-*.pdf pdfmarks

Where out.pdf is the generated PDF, in-*.pdf are the input PDFs, and pdfmarks is a text file with contents like:

[/Title (Title Page) /Page 1 /OUT pdfmark
[/Title (Table of Contents) /Page 3 /OUT pdfmark
...

Nice and easy.

For nested levels, use the /Count attribute. For example:

[/Count 3 /Title (Chapter 1) /Page 1 /OUT pdfmark
[/Count -2 /Title (Section 1.1) /Page 2 /OUT pdfmark
[/Title (Section 1.1.1) /Page 3 /OUT pdfmark
[/Title (Section 1.1.2) /Page 4 /OUT pdfmark
[/Count -1 /Title (Section 1.2) /Page 5 /OUT pdfmark
[/Title (Section 1.2.1) /Page 6 /OUT pdfmark
[/Title (Section 1.3) /Page 7 /OUT pdfmark

The argument to /Count gives the number of immediately subordinate bookmarks. The sign of the argument sets the default display (negative for closed, positive for open).

You can also setup the document info dictionary with something like:

[ /Title (My Test Document)
  /Author (John Doe)
  /Subject (pdfmark 3.0)
  /Keywords (pdfmark, example, test)
  /DOCINFO pdfmark

If you want more detail, take a look at Adobe's pdfmark reference.

I've bundled the whole pdfmarks-generation bit into a script, pdf-merge.py, which generates the pdfmark file and runs Ghostscript automatically. Think of it as a bookmark-preserving version of pdftk's cat. The script uses pdftk internally to extract bookmark information from the source PDFs.

The script also adds a bit of PostScript to ignore any bookmarks in the source PDFs during the Ghostscript run. The only bookmarks in the output will be the ones you specify explicitly in the pdfmarks file. If for some reason the automatically generated pdfmarks are not quite what you want, the script can pause (via --ask) to allow you to tweak the pdfmarks manually before running Ghostscript.