How can I copy bookmarks from PDF to plain text?

Not sure if there's much point in replying to this old post, but I was looking for a solution, and after giving up (the "correct answer" URL is now 404ing), I thought "I wonder if I can view bookmarks when viewing the PDF in Google Chrome?"

Sure enough, you can open the PDF in Chrome, click the top left menu / hamburger icon, click "Document outline", and copy/paste the bookmark text from there.

Hope that helps anyone stumbling upon this question after googling the same thing. 🙂

I guess I will stick with the OCR hack until Adobe provide this trivial enhancement to Acrobat Pro

It's possible to create a list of all bookmarks' names as text using a script. However, if the bookmarks tree is not flat (ie, it has more than one level) then it becomes a somewhat complicated task requiring a recursive function.

I've created a (paid-for) tool that allows you to do it, exporting either as a text file or as a PDF, including (or not) the page number each bookmark is pointing to. You can find it here: http://try67.blogspot.com/2008/11/acrobat-export-bookmarks-to-pdf-txt.html