Create Bookmarks from PDF Table of Contents

AutoBookmark Plug-in for Adobe® Acrobat®

Introduction

The Bookmark Table of Contents operation does the reverse of generating a TOC: it builds a complete bookmark hierarchy from the table of contents that already exists inside your PDF. Instead of hand-creating bookmarks, AutoBookmark analyzes your TOC page(s), reads the entry titles and page references, locates the corresponding destinations, and creates matching parent/child bookmarks for instant, clickable navigation.

Perfect for manuals, reports, and eBooks that include a printed TOC but lack navigation, this tool preserves the structure of your document—chapters, sections, and subsections—so readers can jump to content in a single click. It’s designed to handle multi-level entries and common TOC formatting (such as dotted leaders and page numbers), dramatically reducing setup time while keeping your bookmarks consistent with the TOC your audience sees.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to identify your TOC pages, tune recognition settings, and convert the entries into a clean, well-organized bookmark tree—turning a static table of contents into a set of PDF bookmarks.

Prerequisites

Adobe® Acrobat® Standard, Pro or Classic
MS Windows 11, 10
AutoBookmark™ Standard or Professional plug-in for Adobe® Acrobat®

Tutorial

Select Table of Contents

The first step is to open a PDF document for viewing in Adobe Acrobat, navigate to the page that contains table of contents text and select all text that belongs to it. Just drag mouse around the text to select it.

Select table of contents on the page

Use "Bookmark Table of Content" Menu

Select Menu > Plugins > Bookmarks > Bookmark Table of Contents... from Adobe Acrobat menu.

[⚡ How to locate Plugins menu in Adobe® Acrobat® ⚡]

Select Bookmark Table of Content from the menu

Adjust Settings

Check the desired processing settings. This operation can perform two operations: it can automatically add bookmarks and/or it can add hyperlinks to the table of content entries. Having hyperlinks in the table of contents allows reader to click on the entry and jump to the corresponding page in the document. It instantly makes PDF document easier to navigate.
Press Help... button to learn more about each processing option.

Separate bookmarks will be created for each TOC entry. Each bookmark will point to the destination page as it is listed in the corresponding TOC entry. This operation uses page labels to resolve page numbers.

Understanding PDF Page Numbering

If a TOC has a non-numeric entry(s) (such as i, ii, ix, A-1, B-2) then software looks for a page with this label and creates bookmarks/links to this page if it is present in the current PDF document. If a page with such label or page number does not exist in the current document, then no bookmark/link is generated. It is easy to assign non-numeric page labels or create non-continuous page numbering using "Thumbnails" panel in Adobe Acrobat.

Sometimes, page numbers printed on PDF pages do not match physical page numbers. There are two different ways to work with these documents. First method is to assign page labels that match printed page numbers using "Thumbnail" panel. Second method is to specify a page offset in the settings dialog. Page offset is going to be added to the page numbers found in TOC to resolve to correct physical page numbers. For example, if TOC has "Introduction.....10" entry that points to a "logical" page 10, but in reality this section starts on "physical" page 12. Enter 2 as a page offset to automatically adjust page numbersto correct locations. The first method is a preferable method to deal with "logical" page numbers in PDF documents. It is more flexible and can accommodate all kinds of page numbering schemes include non-numeric ones.

Press OK button to start processing.

Inspecting the Bookmarks Generated

Inspect the processing results. The dialog will show number of bookmarks created.

Verify number of bookmarks created

Bookmarks panel will be opened automatically. It is preferable to have it closed prior to running this operation, because sometimes Acrobat may not update it correctly with new entries. You should see new bookmarks added to the document.

Inspect the results

Click on bookmarks to display a corresponding page.

Verify bookmarks and destination pages

Inspecting the TOC Links

If you have selected an option to add links to the table of content entries, then scroll back to the page with TOC entries and check the hyperlinks added by the process. Click on the links to make sure everything is working as expected.

Verify links in the table of contents

Re-Generating Bookmarks

IMPORTANT: If you are applying this operation multiple times, then you would need to delete links and bookmarks added to the TOC on a previous run before running this operation again. Use Menu > Plugins > Links > Delete All... menu to automatically delete all links on one or more pages. Use Menu > Plugins > Bookmarks > Delete All... menu to delete all bookmarks.