Sort pages in PDF file

[mekosx]

Hi everybody! Thanks for reading my first post.
I have a few hundred pages pdf file, which I need to sort alphabetically, according to a phrase that occurs on every page. Each page looks identically, except the data is different, the data that I want to use for sorting procedure.
I have Adobe Masters Suite CS5 and Adobe Acrobat X, but I have no idea how to begin.
Thanks in advance, and sorry for my english - it's not my native language.

 

[MisterMe]

PDF files are not Word documents. In their simplest form, they are electronic versions of printed pages. Actually, they are computer programs [in a subset of FORTH] that tells the renderer how to print the pages. There is a lot more to rearranging pages than than you would expect from a sort. I have rearranged, inserted, and deleted pages in PDF documents. This is a manual operation that, for the reasons mentioned above, is very difficult to automate.

Without access to your collection of files, my advice is to give your files names that reflect the sort order that you want. You may then be able to concatenate those files into a single large file.

 

[mekosx]

Are you saying that I should split the file into 942 single-paged files, name each one and then join them into one file? This would take me at least 2 days of non-stop work. If you want me to, I could send you a sample file (a whole thing has ~700MB). And would it make any difference if I had the same stuff in DOC file? Would it be easier to rearrange pages alphabetically?

 

[citizenzen]

It sounds like you need the Pages Navigation Panel. If it isn't open already (page icon in the top left corner of your PDF) use your pull-down menu to access it. Click on the page icon to see the pages of your document. Click the page and drag to reposition them in the order that you want.

That's how it's done in theory, however, I just noticed that you have a 942 page document!!!

Good luck with that.

 

[mekosx]

Isn't there any other way to sort this? I don't really feel like rearranging 942 pages manually...
Like i mentioned before - I also have a DOC version of the very same stuff.

 

[lucidmedia]

There are a handful of scripts online (some are command-line) that will automate the process of pulling your PDF into separate PDF files... then you could apply a script that will search, sort them, and merge them back together.

I would suggest pdftk as a toolkit to use:
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

The very top of this page has a useful reference of software libraries for PDF hacking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software

 

[citizenzen]

There are a handful of scripts online ...

Pretty amazing if they could pull that off.

As usual the key is thinking the problem through before doing all the work or else you can end up spending as much time re-doing it.

Who was the genius who decided to alphabetize headers after 942 pages were composed?