parse_toc.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# parse_toc.py

from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument

def parse(filename, maxlevel):
    fp = open(filename, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(fp)
    doc = PDFDocument(parser)

    outlines = doc.get_outlines()
    for (level, title, dest, a, se) in outlines:
        if level <= maxlevel:
            title_words = title \
                          .encode('utf8') \
                          .replace('\n', '') \
                          .split()
            title = ' '.join(title_words)
            print ' ' * level, title


if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print 'Usage: %s xxx.pdf level' % sys.argv[0]
        sys.exit(2)

    parse(sys.argv[1], int(sys.argv[2]))

I had to parse a PDF which contains 3520 pages, each one beeing a level one entry, so the script produced the following error : RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object and stopped.

As a workaround, I splitted the PDF into 500 pages parts, and everything went fine.

Thank you for your script.