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jamesn41637802
Participant
September 14, 2016
Question

Merge books of sheet music into one PDF, with bookmarks, table of contents and tags

  • September 14, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1083 views

I want to merge dozens of sheet music books into one master book with a table of contents and bookmarks to individual pages.  What is the easiest way to do this?  I know how to merge documents.  But can I automatically place bookmarks on each individual page? I assume that later I would have to edit each bookmark to create a table of contents, but it would save time if I could at least automatically place a bookmark on top of each page.  (Most of the music is just one page, and it wouldn't take too much effort to delete bookmarks in the instances where the music was multiple pages.) 

Ideally, I would also like to have the ability to sort the music into categories, by using tags or additional bookmarks.  For example, the music will include different genres.  Is there something I can do that will allow me to sort into categories instantly (like can be done in an Excel spreadsheet)?

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1 reply

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
September 14, 2016

If you combine the files using Acrobat it will automatically generate bookmarks that point to the start of each file, and use the original file names as the names of the bookmarks.

Converting these bookmarks to a TOC can be done using a script, like this one I've developed: Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat -- Create TOC from Bookmarks

You can add your own bookmarks for the various genres, but it might be better to first combine all files of a specific genre to a single PDF, and then merge all of those PDFs, so you have a set of bookmarks pointing to each genre created for you by Acrobat.

J
jamesn41637802Author
Participant
September 14, 2016

Most of the files I have consist of between 20-300 pages of music.  So I don't just need Acrobat to bookmark to the files, but to the individual pages within each file. 

Maybe I should split the files first and then perform a merge, so as to take advantage of the automatic bookmarks?  If I were to do that, would I have to save the split-files one-by-one first (before performing the merge)?

To be clear, this is what I am wondering now:

1.  Split up files within an individual PDF music book - thereby creating hundreds of separate PDFs.

2.  Save each distinct PDF?

3.  Then merge them all, so as to use the automatic bookmark process you mentioned.

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
September 14, 2016

I'm not sure how that will help you, but you can certainly try. And you don't need to save each page on its own. You can do it all at once using the Extract Pages command (Tools - Pages - Extract). There's an option there to save each page as a separate file.

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