How do I read the contents of a bookmark using VBA for Excel

[Athul5C96]

Hi,

has anyone successfully read Adobe PDF Document Bookmarks and the contents of the bookmarks using Excel VBA?  I use Adobe Actobat Std 2017 and Excel 2013.

Any help would be appreciated.

Athula

[Test Screen Name]

What have you tried, and what doesn't work? Or are you still looking for the Acrobat SDK (=documentation)? Or do you have the SDK but can't find the relevant methods?

[Athul5C96]

Hi,

Thank you for replying. I am new to PDF automation with VBA.  I wrote script to open PDFS.  I looking for a VBA code example to either just the bookmark collection and the values in each bookmark.

Any assiatnce would be greatly appreciated.

regards

Athula

[Test Screen Name]

Ok, you MIGHT find samples, but Acrobat programming usually needs a deep study of the documentation. That's what the Acrobat SDK is - just the documentation https://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/documentation.html

[EricS_YEG]

Adobe's failure to provide built-in functionality for accessing bookmarks is unconscionable.

I have a libary of 100s of sheet music PDFs and I want to create a catalog of all the songs (each song is bookmarked), so I figured out how to do this via Excel and VBA. My solution processes all of the PDFs in a user-selected folder and writes the PDF file name plus each bookmark to one sheet and dumps the name of any PDF that is missing bookmarks to a 2nd sheet (so I can go clean up the bookmarks). I'm just including the code to actually read the bookmarks, however.

Note that I only needed to process PDFs with flat bookmark structures, so I don't know what this code will do with nested bookmarks, nor do I care to figure that out (but if you do, please share so others can benefit).

Tip: in the VBA Window, under Tools>References, make sure that "Abobe Acrobat 10.0 Type libary" is checked (the version number may vary, depending on your versions of Excel and Adobe). I don't know if this will work if you do not have Adobe Acrobat; if you only have Adobe Reader, I suspect it will not.

'**************************************************
Sub Get_Bookmarks()

Dim strPDf As String
strPDf = "G:\Data\Books\Sheet Music\Catalog\To Do\Download\Mariah Carey - Number Ones.pdf"

' Create an Acrobat app
Dim AcroApp As Acrobat.CAcroApp
Set AcroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")

' Open the PDF document, Acrobat Viewer layer
'
' strPDF must contain the name and path of the PDF you want to process 
'  you can hard-code it, prompt for it, read it from a list in Excel, etc.
Dim avDoc As Acrobat.CAcroAVDoc
Set avDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
avDoc.Open strPDf, ""

' get the Portable Document layer
Dim pdDoc As Acrobat.CAcroPDDoc
Set pdDoc = avDoc.GetPDDoc

' Create a Javascript object
Dim jso As Object
Set jso = pdDoc.GetJSObject

Dim vBookmarks As Variant

Dim strBookmark As String

' If you run this code in a loop (i.e. to process multiple PDFs), the bookmarks from the previous
' pass will persist, so set vBookmarks to Nil before trying to use BookMarkRoot. That way, if
' vBooksmarks is empty, you know there are no bookmarks in the current PDF
vBookmarks = Nil

' If the PDF has no bookmarks, BookMarkRoot.Children will cause an error, so you need to use an On Error statement
On Error Resume Next
vBookmarks = jso.BookMarkRoot.Children

' If there are no bookmarks in the current PDF, vBookmark will be empty
If Not IsEmpty(vBookmarks) Then

    For Each Child In vBookmarks

        strBookmark = Child.Name ' this is your bookmark text - print it, write it to an Excel sheet or CVS file, etc.

    Next

End If

pdDoc.Close
avDoc.Close False

Set jso = Nothing
Set avDoc = Nothing
Set pdDoc = Nothing
Set AcroApp = Nothing

End Sub
'**************************************************