When copying a page between documents in the Thumbnails pane, all named destinations are merged unintentionally.

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rakunavi
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When copying a page between documents in the Thumbnails pane, all named destinations are merged unintentionally.

Post by rakunavi »

Hello all,

When you drag and drop on the Thumbnails pane to copy pages between two documents, all named destinations on the source document are merged into the destination document. Even if you copy only one page out of hundreds of pages, a large number of unintended named destinations will be merged and you will have to delete them. Is there a way to prevent named destinations from being merged? Is this a bug?

The reproduction procedure is as follows.

  1. Create two new PDF files. Multiple pages are better.
  2. Set different named destinations for all pages of each file.
  3. Open two files, show the Thumbnails pane, and then copy only one page by dragging and dropping.
For example, suppose Document A and Document B have the following named destinations:

  Document A
    Name Page
   A_0001  1
   A_0002  2
   A_0003  3

  Document B
    Name Page
   B_0001  1
   B_0002  2
   B_0003  3

If you copy the first page of Document B between the first and second pages of Document A, named destinations of Document A after copying look like this:

  Document A after copying
    Name Page
   A_0001  1
   A_0002  3
   A_0003  4
   B_0001  2
   B_0002
   B_0003

Thank you,
rakunavi

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Re: When copying a page between documents in the Thumbnails pane, all named destinations are merged unintentionally.

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello rakunavi,

Named Destinations are a special structure inside the PDF specification, and indeed it is hard to copy just some of them.
An alternative might be to use the Inser Pages feature, but then no named destinations - including those related to the page would be copied, so you might need to recreate those.

Kind regards,
Stefan
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rakunavi
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Re: When copying a page between documents in the Thumbnails pane, all named destinations are merged unintentionally.

Post by rakunavi »

Hi Stefan,

Thank you for your reply. Personally, named destinations do not need to be copied when dragging and dropping pages between the Thumbnails Panes. I'm still using Acrobat X, which was released over 10 years ago, and named destinations are not merged during the same operation.

In PDF-XChange Editor, if you copy and paste pages instead of dragging and dropping between the Thumbnails Panes, the named destinations will not be merged. Therefore, I would like to avoid the "drag and drop" and use the "copy and paste" in the future. It's regrettable that I have to avoid drag and drop because it's easy to visually see where the original page will be inserted.

Best Regards,
rakunavi
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Re: When copying a page between documents in the Thumbnails pane, all named destinations are merged unintentionally.

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello rakunavi,

I will bring your comments to the attention of our UI developers and we will see if there's anything we can do about this feature!

Kind regards,
Stefan
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