PDF Bookmarks Extractor

How to use

1. 1Drop a .pdf file onto the upload area or click Choose file. Up to 500 MB is supported. The PDF is read in your browser and never uploaded.
2. 2Wait for the outline to be extracted. The bookmark tree appears with the indentation that matches the nesting in your PDF reader's navigation panel.
3. 3Read the summary card for the total bookmark count, top-level entry count, maximum nesting depth, and how many destinations were resolved to page numbers.
4. 4Switch the Export tabs between Indented text, Markdown, JSON, or CSV depending on where you want to paste the result, then click Copy.
5. 5If the PDF has no /Outlines entry the tool reports that no bookmarks were found. If the file is encrypted it asks you to remove the password in a desktop reader first.

About this tool

PDF Bookmarks Extractor reads the outline tree (the entries you see in the bookmarks or navigation panel of a PDF reader) and gives you a flat, numbered list of every entry alongside the page each one targets. Researchers use it to pull a chapter list out of a long report. Students use it as a quick way to grab the table of contents out of a scanned textbook PDF that does not ship a separate TOC. Technical writers and editors use it to audit whether a generated PDF has the bookmarks the source document promised. The tool parses the PDF in your browser, follows the catalog's /Outlines reference, walks the First / Next / Last linked-list structure recursively, and resolves each entry's destination back to a 1-based page number through the catalog's page tree, the modern /Names tree for named destinations, or the legacy /Dests dictionary. Titles are decoded from PDFDocEncoding, UTF-16 BE with the FE FF byte-order mark, or hex strings exactly the way Adobe Acrobat displays them, so accented characters, em dashes, and non-Latin scripts come through correctly. URI link bookmarks are surfaced separately with the target URL. The result is rendered as a collapsible bookmark tree on the page and you can copy it as indented plain text, a markdown nested list with optional links, a JSON array suitable for piping into a script, or a CSV with id, depth, title, page, destination kind, and URI columns. Files up to 500 MB are supported, and the entire pipeline runs locally, so confidential contracts, legal exhibits, internal reports, signed agreements, and unreleased manuscripts never leave your device. Encrypted (password-protected) PDFs are detected and reported, and PDFs whose catalog is stored inside a compressed object stream (PDF 1.5+ /Type /ObjStm) are also detected with a clear message explaining the limitation. When a destination cannot be resolved, the bookmark is still listed with a no-target badge so you have the complete outline rather than a silently filtered list.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.