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Full Version: Exporting PDF bookmarks for making CSVs
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I've noticed the Import PDF Bookmarks feature is presently not functional. I agree that using CSV files works great, and has much more versatility, but if you have, for example a large fakebook you own with maybe 400 songs, it can be an awful lot of work creating a table of contents, along with the proper page numbers.

Since many books are now published already in PDF format with all the bookmarks, I would be quite happy if one could generate a text file similar to a Song List from the PDF bookmarks which are already in the Mobile Sheets file after you have imported a  fakebook as a song.

It's great having access to all the bookmarks, but it would be really nice to be able to export them as well, as can be done with the Song Lists, and it would make creating CSV files a snap, especially if you wanted to assign audio to individual songs, or put them in a Set List.

Thanks!
With jPdfBookmarks https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpdfbookmarks/ you can export the PDF bookmarks to a text file.
From the PDF bookmarks you get the correct start page of the songs.
Transforming it into a valid CSV file still requires some tweaking.
Some search & replace first.
Multi page songs need additional tweaking to get the "pages" column correct.
LibreOffice formulas can help to do that semi-automatic. You can find an example in the XLS file that I shared with e.g. the CSV file for "Brazilian Jazz Real Book"
see https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=5653
and look at the columns calc.PDFLastPage and calc.PageOrder.
If you have questions just contact me.
Thanks so much!

For the first try, I chose my girlfriends massive 700 page Hal Leonard Ukulele Book.

I adjusted the preferences in Jpdfbookmarks, dumped a text file, cleansed it up in Wordpad, and changed it to a csv. I then just borrowed the formulas from the Brazilian Jazz Real Book Excel file. It really worked great!

The only little issue I had, which didn't seem to bother Mobile Sheets, were single pages producing a hyphen, as in 67- instead of just 67. I assume this is due to some lack of knowledge on my part in Excel.

Even so, everything went perfect on the very first try!

Again, I really appreciate the assistance. This turned out to be under 30 minutes even with my learning curve, and I could have spent a day on something this big doing it the hard way.
If we ever get out from under this awful Covid-19 thing here,we'll be able to go back to doing sing alongs at the old peole's homes, and this will really help with set lists. Hopefully things will be better before we are ready to go into one ourselves!
> The only little issue I had, which didn't seem to bother Mobile Sheets, were single pages producing a hyphen, as in 67- instead of just 67.

Where did this issue show up? If it happened in the Excel file, please share it, including the formula columns.
Here are the files.

I have not set up a good template yet, until I get all my bugs worked out.
I can't see any formulas in the XLSX file that you shared.
My apologies! I tried this one to be sure.
Strange. There's something invisible in column "PDFLastPage" that prevents ISBLANK to return TRUE. A simple delete of the cells in PDFLastPage doesn't help. If I enter something (any character works) and delete it again, the cell is empty and the hyphen disappears.
It might have something to do with the way you created the XLS or with the way you edited the export file. I use Notepad++ instead of Wordpad. You could try that. If that doesn't help we need to check your workflow step by step.