Learn about creating smart PDFs - create bookmarks, use exported data as annotations, embed metadata, and set document properties like linearization.

The ability to process PDFs has been a part of Grooper core capabilities since its inception. The PDF standard, however, is complicated and open-ended, and due to that complexity, certain types of PDFs (including PDFs that were poorly-created or malformed) could cause problems when ingested into Grooper; additionally, we did not have certain capabilities on PDF generation (such as the ability to add bookmarks) that were frequently requested.

In Grooper 2021, the way that we process PDFs has been greatly improved under the hood – we now can inspect almost every part of the underlying PDF – allowing for both new capabilities on export and an increased ability to process PDFs intelligently, allowing for a number of new efficiencies and removing an number of previously-existing limitations. Some highlights include:

  • The ability to create bookmarks on PDFs at export time
  • The ability to reference extracted data in PDF annotation / bookmark creation
  • The ability to deduplicate PDF-internal resources, leading to smaller created PDFs and occasionally making ingested PDFs smaller without any loss of information
  • The ability to embed metadata in PDFs
  • The ability to set certain properties on PDF generation, such as linearization, which allows for fast PDF loading over web