Variant 1: With PDFMiner

This Python-based variant extracts the table of contents in a (pseudo) XML format.

Requires Python $\geq$ 2.6, but < 3.0.

Install PDFMiner

• Download source code from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer/
  • The project is also on GitHub https://github.com/euske/pdfminer/

• Compile and install:

    tar xzf pdfminer-20140328.tar.gz && cd pdfminer-20140328
    python setup.py install
  

Now there should be the executables /usr/local/bin/pdf2txt.py and /usr/local/bin/dumppdf.py.

Extract table of contents as (pseudo) XML

dumppdf.py -T myfile.pdf

Variant 2: With MuPDF

This variant extracts the table of contents in plain text format.

Install MuPDF

• Download source code from http://mupdf.com/downloads/

• Compile and install:

    tar xzf mupdf-1.9a-source.tar.gz && cd mupdf-1.9a-source
    export XCFLAGS=-I/opt/X11/include/X11
    make prefix=/usr/local HAVE_GLFW=no install
  

  Notes: (1) Line 2 indicates to make that the X11 header files are in /opt/X11/include/X11 rather than the default /usr/local/include/X11, this is necessary on Mac OS X, (2) The HAVE_GLFW=no option prevents building the OpenGL version of MuPDF (mupdf-gl), only the X11 version (mupdf-x11) is built. This is to prevent further installation problems.

Now, there should be the executables /usr/local/bin/mupdf-x11 (PDF viewer) and /usr/local/bin/mutool.

Extract table of contents as plain text

mutool show myfile.pdf outline

Note: subsections are indented by tabs, and page numbers are separated by tabs as well.