Automated Parent/Child Bookmark Creation

Josh.Dickie · 2025-07-10T17:27:18+00:00

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What's up community?! I am struggling with an efficient procedure to create bookmarks in bluebeam. I know how to create bookmarks and parent/child formatting. I want to know if it is possible to write a script or if a default method exists to have bluebeam create a parent bookmark such as electrical, mechanical, plumbing, etc and then for each section a child bookmark will be created for that division section.

For example, Electrical will be the parent bookmark and underneath it will be any available child bookmark per specification section such as 26 00 00, 26 05 16, 26 05 19, and so on (example image 1 below-manually created).

Right now I am manually clicking through each page, selecting the header of that page "26 2200 - LOW-VOLTAGE TRANSFORMERS" and using ctrl + b to bookmark it. There MUST be a more efficient method. When I select to create bookmarks based on region, I do not get a positive output (example image 2 below). When I select to create bookmarks by page label I am only returned bookmarks with the page number because a descriptive label does not exist.

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michael miller

@Josh.Dickie, are you starting with individual section PDFs that you then combine? If so, would this work?

When generating the individual section PDFs (from Masterspec, Word, etc.), make sure that the option to create bookmarks is turned off.
When you Combine the individual sections into a project manual PDF, make sure that option 'Include Bookmarks' is checked. Since you created the individual-section PDFs without 'internal' bookmarks, Bluebeam will include a single bookmark for each section, based on the filename.
You can then manually add your Division bookmarks at the appropriate positions, then grab each division's section bookmarks and drag them 'under' the Division bookmark.

Still a certain amount of manual labor, but lots less than navigating to the first page of each section.

Josh.Dickie

@michael miller, thanks for the reply. I don't think this will work for me. I'm not sure how to generate individual PDF sections either, unless this is the parent bookmark header? The documents I work with are standalone PDF files that have been built the way you're describing. I receive them from a GC or gov't entity and then need to create new/add/revise/fix broken bookmarks.

michael miller

@Josh.Dickie I'm a bit confused. It sounds like your workflow would work with what I'm suggesting. (When I said "generating the individual section PDFs", I was referring to you creating the PDFs, one PDF for each "individual" CSI section.)

So you're taking individual PDFs (one per CSI section) received from an outside entity and combining them into a single 'project manual' PDF? If that's the case:

Delete any existing bookmarks from the individual PDFs. (You might ask the outside entity to create the PDFs without bookmarks, which would save you this step.)
When you Combine the individual PDFs into a project-manual PDF, make sure that option 'Include Bookmarks' is checked. Since the individual-section PDFs do not have 'internal' bookmarks (step above), Bluebeam will generate a single bookmark for each section, based on the filename.
Manually add your Division bookmarks at the appropriate positions
Grab each division's section bookmarks and drag them 'under' the Division bookmark.

Josh.Dickie

My apologies. I receive one pdf file that contains all CSI sections ranging from 00 to 40. Most times these bookmarks are broken and need to have the connections manually repaired. If they aren't broken then the sections are missing or need to be modified in some way. So, I'm looking for an accurate and time-saving method to create bookmarks because the page region varies on all of the sheets.

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