PDF_tools_outline

A simple CLI tool made for all the students who started using PDFs instead of paper book in order to save some weight in their backpack but stumbled into the problem of missing outline and shifted page numbering cause by preface, index and other additions.

GUIDA IN ITALIANO QUI

How to install

uv

uv tool install PDF_tools_outline

pipx

pipx install PDF_tools_outline

Development

Clone the repo and install the hooks. It may be necessary to give execution privileges to hooks files

git clone https://github.com/aGenius05/PDF_outline.git
cp ./hooks/* .git/hooks

uv

It's recommended that you use uv cause it makes everything much simpler

uv sync
uv pip install -e .

manual install

Manual installation is a bit trickier, you'll need python3 and pikepdf module. You should install it in a virtual environment through pip3:

python3 -m venv /path/to/venv/
source /path/to/venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install -e .

Indeed requirements.txt contains the version I used and it's guaranteed that it will work on you're computer too.

Testing

This project has some automated tests written in the tests/ dir. They are unittest tests and are configured to run before commits and pushes via the hooks. The material used in the tests is described in this file.

Publishing

A Github Action is configured to look for commits on the main branch which also have a tag, build the package for those and publish them automatically on PyPi

Note that the hooks make it impossible to push to main tagged commit that haven't passed unittests first.

It's also possible to manually send a package version to PyPi using the command:

uv build
uv publish

oppure con pip

python3 -m build
python3 -m twine dist/*

Utilizzo

The usage is very simple:

PDF_outline_add [file_input.pdf] [file_index] {-o [file_output.pdf]} {-s [first_page]}

where file_input is the inpput pdf, first_page is the number of the first page in the "wrong" ordering, file_index is the file where the outline lays and file_output is the output's file name. If file_output isn't specified file_input will be overwritten. The outline file has the following syntax

[starting page number] [section's name]

Subsections/paragraphs, if present, are written adding one additional space in front of their line:

1 first chapter
 2 section 1.1
 3 section 1.2
  paragraph
...

Pages befor the start of the "real" book, if present, are written using roman numeration:

i prefazione
v indicie
1 inizio libro
...

Gemini Gem

To generate index file it's very useful having a custom Agent for Gemini(Gem). To do so give it the prompt.

TODO

• export index from existing pdf
• right numeration on pages with double pages
• y-ordinate for outline entries?
• in place edit?