Disassembling PDF documents

In addition to assembling documents from multiple sources, you can use the Assembler service to disassemble a single PDF document into multiple documents. This is typically useful when the document was originally created from many individual documents, such as a collection of bank statements.

To disassemble a document, use the PDFsFromBookmarks element, as in the following example.

Example: Disassembling documents

<PDFsFromBookmarks prefix="stmt">

	<PDF source="doc1.pdf"/>

</PDFsFromBookmarks>

The PDFsFromBookmarks element is a result element and can be a child only of a DDX element. (It does not have a result attribute because it can result in the generation of multiple documents.)

PDFsFromBookmarks causes a single document to be generated for each level 1 bookmark in the source document (doc1.pdf in this example). The Assembler service generates a name for each document that is the concatentation of the following items:

•	A string specified by the prefix attribute

•	A 6-digit sequence number (This number could be used to re-create the original order of the pages after the document is disassembled.)

•	The bookmark title

•	The file name extension .pdf

Note: Bookmarks may contain characters that are not legal in file names. When saving the result streams as files, the client is responsible for specifying appropriate file names.

In the example, assume that the level 1 bookmarks in doc1.pdf are as follows:

•	"Chapter 1" (beginning on page 3)

•	"Chapter 2" (beginning on page 13)

•	"Chapter 3" (beginning page 21)

There will be three result documents:

•	stmt.000001.Chapter 1.pdf, containing pages 3-12

•	stmt.000002.Chapter 2.pdf, containing pages 13-20

•	stmt.000003.Chapter 3.pdf, containing pages 21 through the last page.

Here are more details about how the documents are separated:

•	Any level 1 bookmark that does not point to a page is ignored.

•	The bookmarks must be in sequence. That is, they must point to pages that are in ascending order. Otherwise, an error is returned.

•

A single page is never extracted into two separate PDF documents. The first page of the first extracted document is the destination page of the first level 1 bookmark. Pages are included until either the end of the document is reached (the last page is included) or another level 1 bookmark is reached (the page before that is included).

In the example, if Chapter 1 ends on page 13 and Chapter 2 begins in the middle of the page, the entire page 13 will appear in stmt.000002.Chapter 2.pdf instead of in stmt.000001.Chapter 1.pdf.

•	If more than one level 1 bookmark occurs on a page, all bookmarks except the first one are ignored.

The separated PDF documents are created as if they came from non-base documents (see About base documents). Document-level elements such as properties, attachments, and initial views are not included in the resultant PDF documents.

If the source document is encrypted, you must provide the master password for the document in order to disassemble it. (See Accessing a password-protected document.)

As with PDF result elements, you can specify these attributes for the PDFsFromBookmarks element:

•	encryption can be set to either the name of a PasswordEncryptionProfile element that specifies password encryption or None (the default), indicating that the documents will not be encrypted. (See Working with Secured Documents.)

•	save can be set to Full (the default) or FastWebView (see Saving PDF documents). Incremental saving is not applicable to disassembled documents.

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