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

Report · Sep 14, 2016

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)?

Report · Sep 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.

Report · Sep 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.

Report · Sep 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.

Report · Sep 14, 2016

The reason I thought of extracting to separate files first was because you mentioned that a merger automatically creates bookmarks at the start, but that wouldn't add bookmarks to the individual pages (as I understand it).

Assume that I get by the hurdle of creating one master document with bookmarks, pages arranged alphabetically and a table of contents.

Will I then be able to add tags or additional bookmarks to the individual pages of that master document so as to enable future sorting?

I guess I can always add additional bookmarks to individual pages, but maybe it would be faster to create some kind of meta-tag earlier in the process?

Report · Sep 14, 2016

If you want a bookmark pointing to each individual page in the file, then yes, your method will work.

You can add additional bookmarks after you merge the files, sure, but don't expect to be able to use them to sort the file (unless a special script is used). That's simply not how bookmarks work. I'm also not sure what you mean by "meta tags", but one such option will be to use comments. Again, this will not allow you to sort the pages, but you could sort (or filter) the comments and then gain easy access to those of a certain kind, for example.

Report · Sep 14, 2016

I think I understand, thanks.

One last question (Probably): is there any functional difference (for my purposes) between using the "extract" function from the "split" function, since I will be effectively creating separate 1-page documents for everything either way?

Report · Sep 14, 2016

I don't think there's any difference, no.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:02 PM, jamesn41637802 <forums_noreply@adobe.com>