PdfMark-Gen

A simple command-line utility for generating pdfmark file (like described here) with metadata (title, author, table of contents) for a pdf file.

It takes two parameters:

• a path to a simple json input file specifying title, a list of authors, and toc being a list of Table of Contents items, each having its own title, page number and optionally children (list of sub-sections of the given ToC item),
• and a path to the output file to which the pdfmark code will be output.

All string (titles, authors) are converted to UTF-16BE with BOM before being written to pdfmark, so it correctly handles non-ASCII unicode characters.

For example given a json file like this as input:

{
  "title": "A Glorious PDF Example",
  "authors": ["Author no. 1", "Author no. 2", "et al."],
  "toc": [
    { "title": "Réamhrá – Preface", "page": 1 },
    {
      "title": "Chapter 1", "page": 4,
      "children": [
        { "title": "Subsection 1.1", "page": 4 },
        { "title": "Subsection 1.2", "page": 5 }
      ]
    },
    { "title": "Posłowie – Afterword", "page":  10 }
  ]
}

it will generate the following pdfmark file:

[ /Title <FEFF004100200047006C006F00720069006F0075007300200050004400460020004500780061006D0070006C0065> /Author <FEFF0041007500740068006F00720020006E006F002E00200031002C00200041007500740068006F00720020006E006F002E00200032002C00200065007400200061006C002E> /DOCINFO pdfmark
[ /Title <FEFF005200E90061006D0068007200E10020201300200050007200650066006100630065> /Page 1 /OUT pdfmark
[ /Title <FEFF004300680061007000740065007200200031> /Page 4 /Count 2 /OUT pdfmark
[ /Title <FEFF00530075006200730065006300740069006F006E00200031002E0031> /Page 4 /OUT pdfmark
[ /Title <FEFF00530075006200730065006300740069006F006E00200031002E0032> /Page 5 /OUT pdfmark
[ /Title <FEFF0050006F00730142006F007700690065002020130020004100660074006500720077006F00720064> /Page 10 /OUT pdfmark

What is it useful for?

It’s useful if you want to add an easily-navigable list of content to a pdf file using Ghostscript, especially if you want to use non-ASCII characters in it.

I’ve written it because I didn’t want to write a pdfmark code by hand, especially since it required the conversion of all the non-ASCII characters to UTF-16BE BOM hex-encoded strings.

How to build it?

Like any other simple Rust program. Ensure you have cargo and rustc installed (see installing Rust), then:

cargo build --release

or (to get a debug executable):

cargo build

How to use it?

Create a json like the example above, save it to an UTF-8-encoded file, then invoke the program:

pdfmark-gen path/to/the/json path/to/output/pdfmark

then you can use the generated pdfmark with Ghostscript:

gs -sOutputFile=path/to/output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
  -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH input.pdf path/to/pdfmark