Markdown TOC exported to PDF?

DEVONthink
23

Would it be possible to (kind of) script this? I’m thinking along these lines:

  • convert the MD to PDF
  • grep all headlines from the MD document
  • for each of them, find the line in the PDF (i.e. the string in the text layer) corresponding to it
  • use the complete line (i.e. possible with leading numbers etc.) to find the PDFSelection in the document
  • using the properties from these PDFSelections, build a PDFOutline for the TOC by creating PDFOutline objects with PDFActionGoTo actions for each selection.
  • and finally adds thisPDFOutline to the document.

I can add an outline to the PDF alright (see the code below), but Preview doesn’t show me neither a TOC nor a bookmark. Instead, it gets really unhappy and finally crashes. Acrobat Reader shows me a bookmark, not no TOC. Is there anything special I have to do so that a PDFOutline is recognized as a TOC (also in Preview, preferably)? The Net is quite terse on that issue.

  const outline = $.PDFOutline.alloc.init;
    const firstChild = $.PDFOutline.alloc.init;
    firstChild.label = $("1st outline line");
    const pdfSelection = pdfDoc.findStringWithOptions($(headline),0);
    if (pdfSelection.js.length > 0) {
      const firstSelection = pdfSelection.js[0];
      const page = firstSel.pages.js[0]; // NSPage object!
      const bounds = firstSel.boundsForPage(page); //NSRect object
      const pt = $.NSPointFromCGPoint($.NSRectToCGRect(bounds).origin);
      const destination = $.PDFDestination.alloc.initWithPageAtPoint(page, pt);
      const action = $.PDFActionGoTo.alloc.initWithDestination(destination);
      firstChild.action = action;
      firstChild.isOpen = true;
      outline.insertChildAtIndex(firstChild, 0);
      pdfDoc.setOutlineRoot(outline);
      pdfDoc.writeToFile(r.path());
    }