How it works
The PDF Bookmarks Viewer reads and displays the outline (table of contents) embedded in a PDF document — the hierarchical list of named destinations that PDF reader applications display in the sidebar. Use it to inspect a document's structure, check that the automatically generated bookmarks match the chapter headings, or navigate a large PDF without a dedicated PDF reader.
What PDF bookmarks are: the PDF specification defines an "outline" (commonly called bookmarks) as a tree structure of named entries, each linked to a specific page or destination. Applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign automatically generate bookmarks from heading styles when exporting to PDF. LaTeX's hyperref package creates bookmarks from section headings. Acrobat's table of contents detection also creates them.
How to use it: upload your PDF and click Load Bookmarks. If the PDF contains an outline, it renders as an expandable nested list. Top-level items (typically chapters or major sections) appear first, with sub-items indented below them. If no bookmarks are found, the tool reports that the document has no outline.
Nesting depth: PDF bookmarks support unlimited nesting levels. A multi-level document might show: Chapter 1 > Section 1.1 > Subsection 1.1.2. This tool renders all levels of the hierarchy.
Missing bookmarks: many PDFs lack bookmarks even when they have a clear chapter structure — this is common for PDFs exported from simple word processors, scanned documents, and PDFs created from browser Print → PDF. Adding bookmarks requires editing the PDF in Acrobat or a similar tool.
Privacy: all outline parsing uses PDF.js in the browser. No document content is uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
- This tool only reads existing bookmarks — it does not create them. To add bookmarks, you need a desktop PDF editor: Adobe Acrobat (professional tier), PDF Studio, or an open-source option like PDFsam Enhanced. If the original document was a Word file, re-export with heading styles mapped to bookmark creation. For LaTeX, add the hyperref package with \usepackage[bookmarks=true]{hyperref} to auto-generate bookmarks from section commands.
- The PDF bookmark specification stores destinations, not page numbers — a destination can be a page reference, a named destination, or a GoTo action. This viewer displays the bookmark title text only, not the destination page number. To see which page a bookmark links to, you would need to resolve the destination reference against the PDF's page tree, which requires additional parsing not implemented in this display-only viewer.
- A visible table of contents page (text listing chapters and page numbers) is not the same as PDF bookmarks. Bookmarks are machine-readable navigation entries in the PDF's outline data structure. Many PDFs have a visual TOC page but no programmatic outline. Word's 'Export to PDF' creates bookmarks automatically from heading styles. A manually typed TOC page does not create bookmarks.
- Not directly from this tool. The bookmark list is displayed as HTML. You can select and copy the text from the rendered list. For a structured export (JSON, XML, or a flat text list with page numbers), a command-line tool like pdfinfo (from the poppler-utils package) or a Python script using pypdf provides richer bookmark data extraction.