Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

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rakunavi
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Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

Post by rakunavi »

Hello all,

As shown in the figure below, there are many documents out there that use an entire page for chapter headings and no other meaningful content. If bookmarks are properly set, it is better to remove these useless pages to make the PDF document easier to read.

  • figure1.png
However, in PDF-XChange Editor and Acrobat, if you delete a page that is set as a destination page for a GoTo action with a bookmark or link, the destination page for the GoTo action will be blank. In this case, it would be appreciated if the page could be rewritten to the page immediately after the deleted page, instead of being blanked.

  • figure2.png

    This is a GIF animation. Click to play.
    This is a GIF animation. Click to play.
Currently I manage to get by with the following procedure, but it is complicated as shown in the video.

  1. Temporarily duplicate the bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor and save the file over.
  2. Select the bookmark entry corresponding to the page to be deleted in JPdfBookmarks and shift the destination page by one page using the "Apply Page Offset" command.
  3. After selecting the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor, delete the pages corresponding to those bookmarks by running "Options > Page(s) > Remove" command in Bookmarks pane.
  4. Delete the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor.
  • This is a GIF animation. Click to play.
    This is a GIF animation. Click to play.
When applying the commands under "Options > Section(s)" in the bookmarks pane, not only the pages covered by the selected bookmark but also the page immediately before the next bookmark of the selected bookmark are included in the scope. In the example above, this includes not only the page displaying "Chapter 1" (physical page number: 1), but also the page displaying the large numbers 1 through 5 on the page (physical page numbers: 2 through 6). However, it would be extremely inconvenient for the user to delete the "Chapter 1" page (physical page number: 1) and have the bookmark no longer function.

Of course, if the individual pages are unrelated and independent, the modified destination page of the GoTo action will have no relevance to the content of the respective page. However, it is sufficient to manually empty the destination page of the GoTo action after that happens. Considering that once information is deleted, it cannot be restored, setting the destination page of a GoTo action to a continuation page of the deleted page, rather than emptying it, seems to be the more conservative and preferred behavior.

However, GoTo actions are used everywhere in PDF, including bookmarks, links, and form fields. Therefore, it is easy to imagine in layman's terms that an automatic correction like the one proposed could degrade the performance of the program by having to search and correct all GoTo actions when a page is deleted. That is probably why the current process is to set the target page as blank. So, fully aware of the difficulties, I am submitting a feature request in the hope that my esteemed and godly developers may have ideas to overcome these concerns.

Thank you for taking the time to read this message.

Best regards,
rakunavi

- PDF-XChange Editor PRO Version: 10.5.0 build 393
- OS Version: Windows 11 Home 24H2 Build 26100.2894
- PC Model: Lenovo IdeaPad C340-15IWL, HP All-in-One 22-c0xx
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Re: Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

Post by Daniel - PDF-XChange »

Hello, rakunavi

Thank you for the suggestion, I have passed this up to the Dev team for consideration. As you said, recursive updates can be complex actions, but this sounds more reasonable. Hopefully they like the idea.

After some discussion, the Dev team has rejected the idea to automatically update these items. Instead we do have two new feature requests, I hope the titles are self explanatory:

RT#7272: FR: Mark/highlight invalid bookmarks
RT#7273: FR: "next invalid bookmark" button


Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
PDF-XChange Co. LTD

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rakunavi
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Re: Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

Post by rakunavi »

Hello Daniel,

Thank you for your review. I am not particularly surprised, as I knew it would probably be rejected from a technical standpoint. Unfortunately, however, the two Feature Requests you presented do not interest me personally at all. This is because they are both effective features for dealing with bookmark items after the fact, after the destination information of the bookmark item has disappeared, and do not contribute in any way to improving the fundamental problem of retaining the destination information of the bookmark item.

Instead, I make the following two Feature Requests. Both are necessary for my actual workflow shown above and will help protect the destination information of bookmark items. They are also likely to be useful for the general work of others. I separated them out because of the sheer volume to include in the first report, but I will use the rejection as an opportunity to make a real request that will serve as a sequel. You can separate it into different topics or whatever you need to do.

Feature Request #1
rakunavi wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2025 7:03 am
  1. Temporarily duplicate the bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor and save the file over.
  2. Select the bookmark entry corresponding to the page to be deleted in JPdfBookmarks and shift the destination page by one page using the "Apply Page Offset" command.
  3. After selecting the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor, delete the pages corresponding to those bookmarks by running "Options > Page(s) > Remove" command in Bookmarks pane.
  4. Delete the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor.
  • In the second of the workaround steps above, I used JPdfBookmarks to shift the bookmarks by one page. Although it appears to be working without any problems in the video, the JPdfBookmarks software has long since been out of development and has many bugs. It is very difficult to use, for example, files cannot be opened simply if some settings are initially set in the document properties of the file. However, there is no other software of the same kind in the world, and it is the only one that works on multiple operating systems, so there are many enthusiasts. The only other way is to output bookmarks as text and process them with some program by oneself. Therefore, we, the users, are still using JPdfBookmarks by devising this and that. If you search for "JPdfBookmarks" in a search engine, you will find users who are struggling with this software.

    Therefore, I propose a feature equivalent to "Apply Page Offset" in JPdfBookmarks, i.e., the ability to shift the destination page of a GoTo or GoToR action for a selected bookmark item forward or backward by a specified number of pages.

    • "Apply Page Offset" command in JPdfBookmarks
      "Apply Page Offset" command in JPdfBookmarks
    This is a simple function, but therefore very versatile. For example, PDF-XChange Editor has a "Generate Bookmarks from Page Text" command, which adds bookmarks to the page where the page text is located. However, the page on which the bookmark is to be placed and the text to which the bookmark is to be placed are not necessarily on the same page.

    For example, consider the case of a double-page spread document with a chapter heading in the upper right corner of the header on the right-hand page, which you want to use as a reference when setting a bookmark. The chapter heading is on the right-hand page, but the chapter begins on the left-hand page of the double-spread. In such a case, it would be appreciated to be able to shift the bookmark to only one page.

    • The page where the text you want to use as an indicator for bookmark generation exists and<br />the page where you want to set a bookmark do not necessarily match.
      The page where the text you want to use as an indicator for bookmark generation exists and
      the page where you want to set a bookmark do not necessarily match.
    Also, think of other documents where the roles of the left and right pages are completely separated on the double-page spread. For example, if a question booklet has questions on the left-hand page and answers/explanations on the right-hand page, I would like to use the text on the right-hand page as keywords and the actual destination page for bookmarked items to be the left-hand page. In such a case, it would be appreciated if it is possible to shift the bookmark to only one page.

    Of course, you could add a page offset option to the "Generate Bookmark from Page Text" command itself, but if you generate bookmarks with multiple text items as keywords, not all of them will need to be offset under the same conditions. Therefore, adding a separate "Apply Page Offset" command may be more useful to more people.
Feature Request #2
rakunavi wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2025 7:03 am
  1. Temporarily duplicate the bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor and save the file over.
  2. Select the bookmark entry corresponding to the page to be deleted in JPdfBookmarks and shift the destination page by one page using the "Apply Page Offset" command.
  3. After selecting the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor, delete the pages corresponding to those bookmarks by running "Options > Page(s) > Remove" command in Bookmarks pane.
  4. Delete the shifted bookmarks in PDF-XChange Editor.
  • In the third of the workaround steps above, the command "Options > Page(s) > Remove" in Bookmarks pane is executed. In this example, this worked because there are no child bookmarks, but it will not work with a hierarchical bookmark, such as a section heading bookmark under a chapter heading.

    The following two commands in Bookmarks pane will not only include the selected bookmark, but also the child bookmarks.

    • Options > Page(s)
    • Options > Section(s)
    However, it would be very useful to have an additional command that narrows the scope by one more step and does not include child bookmarks, but really only the selected bookmark.

    • Options > Page(s) (child bookmarks are not included)
    • Options > Page(s)
    • Options > Section(s)
    • The above figure shows the selection range for each method<br />when the bookmark &quot;Installation&quot; is selected in the PDF manual (PDFXE10_MAN.pdf) of the PDF-XChange Editor.
      The above figure shows the selection range for each method
      when the bookmark "Installation" is selected in the PDF manual (PDFXE10_MAN.pdf) of the PDF-XChange Editor.
    Needless to say, this feature is simple and therefore has many possible common use scenarios. For example, suppose you have used the bookmark filtering function to pick up only chapter headings. Now, when "Options > Page(s) > Remove" is executed, not only the chapter heading displayed as the filtering result, but also the page indicated by the child bookmark will be removed. The user's intuition would be to remove only the pages indicated by the bookmark in the filtering results.
P.S.
The link from the PDF-XChange Editor manual page to the Classic UI version of the manual page is outdated. It is the red square in the figure. This is a minor detail for your information.

  • The link address is old “https://help.pdf-xchange.com/pdfxe9c/”.
    The link address is old “https://help.pdf-xchange.com/pdfxe9c/”.
Thank you for taking the time to read this message.
Please give my best regards to the developers.

Best regards,
rakunavi
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Re: Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

Post by Daniel - PDF-XChange »

Hello, rakunavi

I have raised these suggestions, though I cannot make any promises for what will happen in the future.

Following that our manuals team is already looking into the reported link error, and will be fixing it soon.

[Edit]
(I am sorry to say that the first item has been rejected). [I apologize for the quick edit, I mistakenly said both originally, but the second item is still in limbo at the moment]

[Edit2-Electric boogaloo]
Meanwhile, the second item has been approved, and we have a ticket for it:
RT#7290: FR: add "Page(s) > Ignore child bookmarks" option

[Edit3]
After some further discussion, The dev team has reconsidered, and the First item is now getting its own request ticket as well! We cannot promise when, but the Team is fairly confident it will be possible.
RT#7291: FR: Edit bookmark - page offset function

Kind Regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
PDF-XChange Co. LTD

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rakunavi
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Re: Feature to automatically correct the GoTo action to the next existing page if the destination page is deleted

Post by rakunavi »

Hello Daniel, thank you for creating the ticket!

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to let me know the results of your review.
Please give my best regards to the developer.

Best regards,
rakunavi
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