Question: Under what circumstances would you find it useful to do a PDF split by bookmarks as described in your most recent PDF for Lawyers post?
Answer:
The splitting feature is useful when you have one PDF that contains lots of individual documents. I often create such PDFs on purpose, because it’s easier to scan a batch of documents at once and then break them up afterwards.
The way I break them up is to bookmark the beginning of each document. While I’m doing that I also name the bookmark what I want the resulting file to be (e.g. “2001_11_21 Contract from Acme”). As you can see, I use the convention of a 4 digit year, then 2 digit month and 2 digit date, followed by a short description.
When I split the PDF, I choose the following options:
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- Spit by top level bookmark
- Use bookmark name for file name
- Output to [specified folder]
That lets me quickly breakup the PDF into individual docs that have date-based file names. The resulting files will auto-sort in the designated folder. I put all case PDFs in one folder called “Documents”.