PDFOutliner for Mac

Overview of the app

PDFOutliner is a compact utility that helps you add a table of contents to PDF documents with minimal effort. It’s aimed at people who prepare written reports in PDF form and want a structured contents list without manual editing.

Key functionality

• Generates a navigable contents structure based on the page locations of chapters and sub-sections.
• Works with PDFs created from other apps (for example, exports from Pages) and with multi-page scanned documents that you’d like combined and organized into a single PDF.
• Recognizes OCR’d pages, so text from scanned pages can be indexed and included in the table of contents.

How the table of contents appears

When someone opens a PDF you’ve processed with PDFOutliner in a reading application, the contents you created will be available in a sidebar or a pop-over panel, making navigation through long documents easier.

Who benefits most

• Ideal for students preparing papers that require a contents page before submission.
• Useful for professionals (such as engineers) who produce numerous multi-page reports and need quick nav links.
• Less helpful for casual PDF users who don’t require a formal table of contents for their documents.

Other options to consider

• Automatically builds a table of contents within the document when used with supported software.
• Typically sold as part of a paid desktop office package.
• Microsoft Word (as a common alternative) can produce TOCs automatically when exporting to PDF.