Bookmark Differences

I did a bit of research into this issue, as it came up in another thread (on the Adobe Acrobat Windows forum), and the question intrigued me.

It seems that when you combine files using the built-in functionality of Acrobat, each file is saved in a separate "Structure Element", which is a logical unit within the PDF. For most intents and purposes this doesn't mean much to the end-user. However, the bookmarks that are created during this process also contain this information and therefore behave in a different way to those that are created with Ctrl+B or even with a script.
In fact, a script is not even capable of differentiating between the two types (it's the "SE" key in the Outline Item dictionary, for those interested).
However, a plugin or a tool using an external library is capable of seeing this, and even changing it.
Fortunately, what you want to do is simple, you just need to remove this key and the bookmark is reverted to the "normal" type. The other way around can be more complicated.
I have written a small app that can do this, and it will be available to download (for free) from my website soon.

Wow, please let me know when that app is available.

Its kind of stupid even acrobat can't fix this.
This tagged bookmark have its own usefulness when editing the pdf pages and sections, but once you know that you are not going to modify the pages, the functionality of it becomes useless.

Here it is:
http://try67.blogspot.com/2011/09/batch-change-bookmarks-type.php

hi,

your app doesn't process the pdf, it only show folder?
Maybe you should change to file chooser.

It was created as a batch processing app, so you can select a folder and it will process all the PDF files in that folder (and all sub-folders, if you choose so).

I have been trying to figure out how to change the settings of all the bookmarks in a single document to the same setting without having to edit the property of each bookmark, e.g., inherit zoom. Would your batch processing app accomplish that? Ideally, it would be grerat if one could set the property setting of the book mark when making the file. Is that possible?

thanks.

I actually recently developed a tool that converts all bookmarks to Inherit Zoom, but I haven't placed it on my website yet. If you're interested, you can contact me directly (my email address is in my signature) to purchase it.

Regarding setting this property when creating the file: I assume it's possible, but it depends very much on how you're creating the file.