Using Actions to Sort .pdf Pages

[RobMercer]

Over the past 40 years my employer has purchased thousands of parts from companies all over the world.  Each part has a certification report associated with it.  The reports vary in length from a couple hundred pages to about 4,000 pages.  The reports fill up many storage closets as they are in paper form.  

It has been decided that these reports need to be converted to text searchable .pdfs.  Also, each page in each report must be examined and designated to one of 14 information categories.  The final .pdf must be issued with an overall table of contents and 14 individual tables of contents, one for each category.  The pages must be sorted so that the right pages fall behind the TOC for each of the 14 sections.

This appears to be a daunting task.  I have developed a brute force way to do this and have tried it on a few reports.  First scan the report, then examine each page on a paper copy and write the number of the section to which it belongs, next use Acrobat DC to sort the pages into the right order using the paper copy as a guide, then make the 14 tables of contents, number the pages in the new report, finally make the overall TOC.  On average it has taken about 35 manhours to do a single conversion.  At this rate it will take millions of salary dollars to do the conversion of all the documents.  I am looking for a better way to do this job.  Not only is this expensive but it is mind numbing to convert a report!

I'm wondering if a form could be developed that would have the overall format of the TOC and the 14 individual TOCs.  After scanning, the .pdf of a report would be added after the form.  Someone could then examine each page and somehow electronically "stamp" it with the proper category.  Next would be a "magic" action (driven by JavaScript?) that would pull each page of the report into the correct location behind the right individual TOC, determine the page numbers of every page in the report and enter it into the TOCs, add headers and footers including page numbers, and then save the properly formatted final report.

Any ideas on how to do this would be appreciated.  Sorry that this was so long but it took a while to explain.

[try67]

This is not a simple task, but it's certainly doable. And if the OCR process is successful it might even be possible to automatically categorize each page, thereby automating the entire process. However, I think that doing it with JavaScript is going to be tricky, especially with such a large volume and files with so many pages. I would consider using a stand-alone tool for this task.

Either way, if you're interested in hiring a professional to do it for you feel free to contact me privately via [try6767 at gmail.com]. I've developed similar tools for my clients in the past and am sure I can create one that will fit your needs, too.

[Thom Parker]

To script such a task would be very, very, slow. I've written plug-ins to perform similar actions. A plug-in is roughly 100 to 1000 times faster than a script. If you would like to discuss a possible solution, PM me from this forum, or contact me through www.windjack.com