Select all pages that are link targets  SOLVED

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David.P
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Select all pages that are link targets

Post by David.P »

Hello forum and Tracker Support Team,

I often have PDF files with thousands of pages and many thousands of internal hyperlinks.

Sometimes it is necessary to create a shorter excerpt of such a PDF file with, say, some hundred pages only, or even less. For this purpose, it would be very helpful if it were possible to select all pages which are target of any internal hyperlink (because when an internal link points to a page, you'd probably want to keep that page in the document, while rather removing those pages that have no links pointing to them).

This would be similar to "Select Pages with Links":
Image

...only the other way around, i.e. "Select Pages that are Link Targets".

I would be very grateful for an idea how this could be achieved. If it seems impossible at the moment, it would be great if this idea could be added as a feature request.

Best regards
David
Last edited by David.P on Sat Jan 30, 2021 7:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
David.P
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Select all pages that are not link targets

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, David.P

At this moment, the best workaround I see is using the current "pages with links" function, and then in the thumbnails pane, clicking "options > select > invert selection" to swap the selection to all pages not currently selected (IE those without links). This is of course assuming that none of the pages which are link targets also contain links, which is not a great assumption, but it may be useful to some degree for you.

At the least, This may be somewhat helpful for you while I bring this idea to our Dev team for consideration. For tracking I have created the following ticket:
RT#5357: FR: Select pages that are link targets

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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David.P
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by David.P »

Thank you Daniel,

while your workaround probably would not yet allow me to delete the 90% of pages that are not link targets reliably enough, I am particularly thankful for making this into a feature request.

Best regards
David
:)
Last edited by David.P on Sun Jan 31, 2021 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Select all pages that are not link targets

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

:)
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
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David.P
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by David.P »

Hi Forum and Tracker Support Team,

I'd like to reach out again about this feature request.

As an example, I am currently working with a PDF file containing about 5000 pages, 5000 comments, 1000 bookmarks and 1500 internal hyperlinks.

I'd like to clean up and compress this file by deleting the least used documents, i.e. ranges of pages, contained therein.
Manually this is hardly practicable given the enormous size of the file.

Therefore, it would be great if it were possible to automatically identify all pages that neither contain comments nor are targets of any of the internal hyperlinks, in order to be able to mass-delete these pages (after inverting the selection)

Image

Thanks once more for considering adding this feature!

Kind regards

David.P
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets  SOLVED

Post by Sasha - Tracker Dev Team »

Hello David.P,

We've just started implementing this one, so it should probably be ready for the 353 release, if all goes well.

Cheers,
Alex
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David.P
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by David.P »

Image
Wow Alex, thank you very much for this fast action!

This feature will make it tremendously easier to compress and clean up large PDF project files with thousands of pages!

Looking forward to this feature!

Keep up the great work!
Best regards
David
:)
David.P
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Select all pages that are link targets

Post by Sasha - Tracker Dev Team »

:)
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David.P
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by David.P »

Gentlemen,

I almost missed the fact that this feature has already been implemented in the latest build of PDF-XChange Editor!

image.png

Image
Using this new feature, I was just able to reduce a file with 5100 pages, 800 bookmarks, 4900 comments and 2100 internal hyperlinks (270 MB) to 1800 pages (180 MB) with a few mouse clicks. Thus, 65% of all pages were deleted -- however only those pages that contained neither comments nor hyperlinks, and that also were not targets of bookmarks or hyperlinks.

In other words, all thousands of comments, links and bookmarks of the file remain fully present and functional, and only pages that are of lesser interest were deleted.

If I had to do this by hand, it would have literally taken days! Realistically, it might not even doable by hand.

Keep up the great work, on the greatest PDF editor in the world!
David.P
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Select all pages that are link targets

Post by Sasha - Tracker Dev Team »

:)
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PHK
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by PHK »

This is an excellent addition; thank you! However, might you consider a further enhancement?

So, once this filtered page selection is run, you get the appropriately highlighted thumbnails which is good. However, if you click on one of the highlighted thumbnails to inspect the page, you lose all the highlighting that you have just created. To inspect more pages, you must start the select pages process all over (at least the filtering is remembered).

It would be nice to have the option of retaining the thumbnail highlights even if the respective pages are selected for inspection so that one can go back to the thumbnails panel and select further pages to view and inspect. I am not sure how this would be done or how to un-highlight when the task is complete but I hope your development team might consider this.

Thanking you in advance...
All best,

FringePhil
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by PHK »

A further thought: two new View commands would go some way to solving my problem of above. Those would be "View->Next Highlighted Page" and "View->Previous Highlighted Page." These might be useful additions even without the page selection tools enhancements.
All best,

FringePhil
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by Sasha - Tracker Dev Team »

Hello PHK,

To retain the selection, you can use the Pages View's navigation bar to choose the needed page.
image.png
image.png (6.96 KiB) Viewed 3752 times
Also, if the pages are scattered throughout the document, you can simply export them to the new document and view them there if needed - this won't take long and you will have an isolated query for your needs.

Another alternative is to use the Bookmark every Nth Page feature from Bookmarks tab and create bookmarks with specific names for every selected page:
image1.png
Cheers,
Alex
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PHK
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Re: Select all pages that are link targets

Post by PHK »

Thank you, Sasha, those are useful suggestions.
All best,

FringePhil
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Select all pages that are link targets

Post by Sasha - Tracker Dev Team »

:)
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