This is a wonderful feature. However, many documents start with prefatory material usually numbered in Roman numerals i, ii, iii, etc. Then the substance of the report is started on page 1.  The automatic outline assumes that page 1, 2, 3 correspond to the actual pages 1, 2, 3, etc of the pdf file. While the resulting outline can be relinked to proper pages using the inspector, it would be very nice if one could specify an offset to account for the prefatory material so that if there were n pages of prefatory material, page m of the table of contents would be linked to page n+m of the pdf file. This would seem relatively simple to implement.

The prefatory material could be linked manually.

That is an excellent suggestion. I’ll look into it when I get the chance.

That was written without checking first. This function is actually already designed to match the entries in the table of contents by label of the corresponding pages, not by page number. So there must be some discrepancy in your file between the labeling in the TOC and the labels on the actual pages. If you can send me a sample file that exhibits the issue, I can try to find a solution.

Ok, upon seeing the file I got the picture. I’ll use the submitted file’s properties as an example, but the solution is general for this type of situation.

The issue is that the pages are labeled straight from 1 to 137, while the printed aspect of the pages, and how they are listed in the TOC, has the first 24 pages labeled in roman numerals, after which the arabic numerals start beginning at number 1. To make the automatic outline generation feature work correctly it is necessary to match how the pages are listed in the table of contents with how the pages are labeled within the PDF document. Fortunately this is really easy in PDFClerk:

1. Select page 1 to 24 in the page list.
2. Right-click the page list and choose “Relabel Selected Pages…” from the contextual menu.
3. In the dialog “Relabel Pages Starting with Number:” 1 and choose the lower-case roman numeral style from the popup menu, then click OK.
4. Repeat the process for the rest of the pages by selecting page 25 to the last page in the list and relabeling from 1, but this time choosing arabic numerals.

The above process should take less than a minute to perform. The document is now ready to have its outline generated.

In short: The automatic outline feature works fine out of the box when the PDF page labels match the visual page labels. When this is not the case, it is often quick and easy to make the necessary adjustments.

Thank you very much. I will be sending my order in shortly.  However, to quibble some more.  The automatic feature has a problem with multiline entries such as

7. Fracture toughness J–R curves obtained from DC potential and elastic
unloading compliance methods for specimens Y4–02 and Y4–03 of thermally
aged cast CF–8M SS…................................................................................................ 9

The outline will give only the last line “aged cast CF-8M SS” to describe the bookmark. It would be preferable to have the whole text.  Any simple solution to this one?

Multiline entries may have to be post-processed by hand. In this case you could copy the lines, double click the corresponding outline item and paste. Then make sure you remove the two line feeds that will likely have sneaked their way in there. The algorithm that auto-creates the outlines is quite simple, or naive, really. It helps one get the bulk of the work done quickly and easily most of the time, but some clean-up may be necessary.

A demonstration movie of the process of adjusting the page labels and automatically generating an outline is available online. It also shows how to drag and drop outline items to create multi-level outlines:
http://sintraworks.com/media/tutorialclips/AutomaticOutlineGeneration.mov

Hi!

I have this exact issue on nearly every PDF I use.  The prefatory material is numbered with Roman Numerals (i, ii, iii) and the main material of the PDF has Arabic numbering (1, 2, 3).  The page number printed on the page almost never matches the number of the page within the PDF document.

Thank you for putting up this clarification.  I too have been searching through the “Outline and Link Automation” help section of the User Guide as well as the online tutorials without success.  Perhaps this clarification is something you’d be willing to add to the PDFClerk Pro User Guide?

Thanks for the wonderful product!