Breaking up a PDF

Question

We have a large PDF with bookmarks that the client wants to break up into a separate PDF for each volume. It is created through one XML assembly file that callsall theother entity files. I'm not exactly sure how to do this other than to break up the one assembly file into a separate assembly file for each volume. They've tried extracting the volumes from the PDF itself but the bookmarks disappear. Any suggestions are welcome. (Version 6.0, FOSI)

cleccese · Answer

Gareth and Ed responded to my post:Gareth:If the document has sequential page numbering and/or cross-references between the volumes then it would be very difficult to print each volume of the document in turn.The best bet is to produce a monolithic PDF and then split it into chunks. If the bookmarks are getting lost then that means you need to use a better PDF split tool that retains the bookmarks. We have written code for prior projects which achieve this via libraries such as iText or PDFBox. I don't believe any of the Arbortext tools have a function for PDF splitting.BTW the other problem you might have is intra-document hyperlinks. If volume 1 contains hyperlinks to other volumes then after the document is split those hyperlinks would no longer work. It would be possible to programmatically fix those type of hyperlinks but I don't believe any PDF tools will do that out the box. You would have to write custom code.Ed:If you have some way of flagging where the Volumes begin and end, and have a separate output DTD with the Volume structures, XSL should work for transforming your source into multiple output volumes. Sounds like a lot of work, but transforming to a more versatile output doctype/DTD/Schema may be helpful for other reasons.

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