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Challenges in generating bookmarks from TOC entries in e-books

Article · September 2012

DOI: 10.1145/2361354.2361363

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Yogalakshmi Jayabal Chandrashekar Ramanathan

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 Challenges in generating bookmarks from TOC entries in
e-books
Chandrashekar Ramanathan Mehul Sheth
International Institute of Information International Institute of Information International Institute of Information
Technology Bangalore Technology Bangalore
India India
rc@iiitb.ac.in mehulkumarjayprakash.sheth@iiitb.net
ABSTRACT
The task of extracting document structures from a digital e-book
is difficult and is an active area of research. On the other hand,
many e-books already have a table of contents (TOC) at the
beginning of the document. This may lead us to believe that
adding bookmarks into digital document (e-book) based on the
existing TOC would be trivial. In this paper, we highlight the
challenges involved in this task of automatically adding
bookmarks to an existing e-book based on the TOC that exists
within the document. If we are able to reliably identify the
specific locations of each TOC entry within the document, the
algorithms can be easily extended to identify document structures
within e-books that have TOC. We describe a tool we have built
called Booky that tries to add automatic PDF bookmarks to
existing PDF based e-books as they have TOC as part of the
document content. The tool addresses most of the challenges that
have been identified while still leaving a few tricky scenarios still
open.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.7.4 [Document And Text Processing]: Electronic Publishing.
General Terms
Documentation
Keywords
PDF, bookmarks, structure analysis, table of contents, TOC.
1. INTRODUCTION
The document structure extraction and hierarchy detection is an
active area of ongoing research. In view of that, Table of contents
(TOC) is important, as it provides the index into the various
portions of books, journals, magazines, reports and so on. TOC
contains references to the different parts of the book and reflects
the natural and the logical structure of the book. Automatic
extraction of the table of contents (TOC) is of importance as any
further processing of the document content is made easier as it
eases the way to obtain the appropriate division information from
Yogalakshmi J
Technology Bangalore
India
j.yogalakshmi@iiitb.org
the TOC. The task of adding bookmarks, document
categorization, and document content analysis can also be carried
out using the TOC of the books. Specifically, extraction of TOC is
an important pre-requisite for the task of adding bookmarks
automatically. Most of the PDF based e-books come with built in
bookmarks which points to just the page in which that content is
present rather than pointing to exact location of the content within
a page which helps us to identify structure later on. In our
approach we have considered a case where in PDF based e-books
are of single column based PDF. Once we identify correct
location of each of the TOC entry in a page, we can then use this
information to extract structure by referring to the content as a
section or chapter content between two subsequent section and
chapter entry within a page. Earlier, there has been work done on
the extraction of TOC from digital documents, but they were more
focused on scanned images. Also work on bookmark creation was
targeted only for e-book readers. Our goal is to add bookmarks
automatically using the information extracted from the TOC for
any PDF based e-book. Also, the bookmarks are placed at the
exact location of the text inside the book as opposed to merely
linking it to the beginning of the page. Also, bookmarks are not
present for all section & subsections always. Since TOC is used,
bookmarks are created for all sections & subsections in our
approach.
The task of adding bookmarks automatically is divided into two
major sub-tasks. 1) Extraction of TOC content 2) Adding
Bookmarks (links).
The paper is organized in the following way. In section 2, we
discuss the related work. In section 3, we discuss the proposed
approach & challenges involved in creation of bookmarks,
extraction of TOC entries. In section 4, we discuss the
implementation details. In section 5, we discuss the open issues
and in section 6 we give a summary and draw our conclusions.
2. RELATED WORK
A number of methods exist for TOC extraction, which is widely
reported. Mandal et. al [1] proposed to extract the TOC from the
scanned documents. Their approach is primarily based on optical
character recognition (OCR), page heuristics and related
techniques. Young-Bin Kwon and Jaehwa Park[2] proposed a
segmentation algorithm to extract the author information, title and
page number from the table of contents of journals. From the
images, the segmentation algorithm identifies regions of interest
with some threshold and extracts table of contents without the use
of character recognition technique. Liangcai et al,[3] propose to
extract the table of contents by generating a statistical model for
the same and using the model to analyze the other TOC entries
with the use of clustering algorithms. This paper also gives a brief
analysis of the existing attempts on the extraction of the TOC and
categorizes the same. Prateek Sarkar and Eric Saund [4]
extensively study the structure and styles of TOC. Here, they
propose a framework for understanding TOC of books, journals
and magazines. They propose a universal logical structure for the
entries in the TOC as a combination of the descriptor with its
locator. They explain the triplets that could be obtained from the
TOC entries and about the hierarchal tree generation from the
same. They also have proposed possible methods to retrieve the
book’s contents based on the retrieved TOC. Belaid [6] proposes
the recognition of TOC with part-of-speech tagging. Bourgeois et
al [5] propose a stochastic model based on the text attributes and
the spatial relations. William S. Lovegrove et al, [11] proposed to
extract the logical structure / reading order using geometric layout
of the content in the document. This is mainly addresses
document classification and understanding. This approach will
help in identification of the TOC pages but, still requires
additional logic, as it mainly identifies: Text, Titles, Images,
Header, Footer, Caption, and Unknown. In order to retrieve the
actual title from the TOC pages, additional parsing of the content
is required to identify them appropriately. S. Marinai. et al, [12]
propose heuristic approaches to retrieve TOC pages. The titles
corresponding to a page number are built by working backwards,
till the previous page number is reached. This works fine in
bookmark creation, only when the potential title built has title
alone without any division number and separator that separate
title from page number. No information on, whether any more
processing is done on the potential title is not clearly available on
the paper. The approach used to match these titles with the ones
inside the content of the book is using word similarity with tri-
gram indexing and Title's Bounding box numbers, which is
different from our proposed approach below. Hervé Déjean and
Jean-Luc Meunier [7] proposed a functional approach that relies
on the functional properties that a TOC. These properties are:
Contiguity, Textual similarity, Ordering, Optional elements, No
self-reference. Their hypothesis is that these five properties are
sufficient for the entire characterization of a TOC, independently
of the document class and language. Attempts have been made to
create bookmarks in e-books but none of them is targeting
automatic creation of bookmarks. They are either device oriented
or require manual activities. Johannes Schöning et al. [9] have
proposed bookmark creation for e-reader. Dongwook Yoon et al
[10] propose bookmark creation for Touch based device. Jürgen
Steimle et al [8] propose bookmark creation using electronic pen
and physical color coded paper. Automatic bookmark creation is
not widely reported partly due to the fact that the most of the e-
books come with the bookmarks at least at the chapter level. Even
those existing bookmarks are only at the page level.
3. PROPOSED APPROACH
Adding automatic bookmarks to e-books is a 2-step process. The
first step involves the process of extracting the table of content
(TOC) entries. The second step involves using them to create the
bookmarks. Here, we describe these tasks in detail.
3.1 Extraction of TOC Entries
Automatic parsing of TOC will be of great use to extract the
structure of the document, document recognition etc. To extract
TOC entries, actually poses a big challenge, since TOC appears in
wide variety of styles and structures. Parsing TOC of a particular
known structure and style is less challenging, than parsing any
given TOC in a systematic way. An entry in TOC can be
characterized by a triplet that is comprised of <division, title, page
number>. For example, <”Chapter 1”, “Introduction”, 5> is an
example of a TOC triplet. The extraction of these triplets can be
subdivided into the following tasks: 1) Identification of the start
of the TOC page. 2) Identification of the end of the TOC page 3)
Parsing the TOC entries to construct triplets. All the books need
not necessarily contain the triplets; instead it could contain just
the <“Introduction”, 5> and not having any division number, or a
combination of these. We rely mainly on title and a bit page
number for bookmarks creation.
3.1.1 Challenges in extraction of TOC entries
The challenges are described below:
1. Identification of beginning of TOC: The words “Contents”
or “Table of Contents” in a single line, indicates the potential
start of the table of contents. To confirm the same, the
occurrence of <division, title, page number> triplet
throughout that page is checked. This shows that a particular
page contains the TOC entries.
2. Identification of end of TOC: The first line item of the TOC
is stored as the “End Indicator” for TOC entries. For
example, if the first TOC entry is “Chapter 1. Introduction”,
then all the content until the next occurrence of “Chapter 1.
Introduction” is treated as the full table of contents. As this is
not always true, identification of the pattern between title and
page number in the TOC entry is also important.
3. Identification of TOC triplet: The TOC entries are parsed
to separate the page number, title and the division names and
numbers into a separate data structure. The parsing makes
use of regular expressions to populate the triplets. (i)
Separation of roman and Arabic numerals for division
number is comparatively easier and regular expressions are
created accordingly to distinguish these two. (ii) Appearance
of alphanumeric in division part like “Chapter 1:
Introduction …….5” is little trickier. This is also handled in
tool through regular expression with some additional
constraints.
4. Identification of separator between title and page
number: The catch here is that, appearance of separator
should be unambiguously distinguished from any special
character that appears as part of the title. The regular
expression comes handy, to distinguish these ambiguous
situations. For example, the TOC entry like “Java 1.1 and
Earlier …….305” is parsed and results in <“Java 1.1 and
Earlier”, 305>. Here, the “.” in the title (i.e., “Java 1.1”)
needs to be distinguished from the actual separator “.” that
appears later in the line before the page number.
5. Identification of roman and Arabic numerals for page
numbers: The page numbers could be roman numerals or
Arabic numerals. Regular expressions are used to
differentiate these.
6. Identification of TOC triplets in multi-line entries: Most
TOC entries are single line, but some could span more than a
single line. An additional constraint validates the same. A
check is made for the presence of the separator pattern. If a
separator pattern is not found, parser assumes that it could be
potential candidate for a multi-line TOC entry and therefore
expects immediate next line to have separator pattern. If
found, then these two lines are concatenated to form a single
line TOC entry. From this, the actual triplet is extracted.
 Point to be noted is that, when a separator pattern is not
found, there could be two possibilities: (a) the line could be
page header i.e. something like the “Part I” as it indicates
beginning of “Part I”. Or (b) the line is actually the multi-line
TOC entry.
7. Identification of Non-TOC entry: Non-TOC entries such as
Header / Footer / decorative elements etc. can appear in
between TOC entries at the start of the page and at end of the
page respectively. These are ignored with the regular
expression for the same.
3.2 Adding Bookmarks
Once table of content is extracted in the form of triplets, it is used
to create bookmarks. It might be possible that source file already
has bookmarks in which case bookmarks creation will be ignored.
Also, those bookmarks can be deleted and this approach could be
used to create for the entire TOC. Bookmarks are placed at the
exact location of the text inside the document.
3.2.1 Challenges in bookmark creation
Bookmark creation starts by first matching exact text followed by
finding page that has matching text and position of matching
entry. The challenges faced are summarized below:
1. Identification of physical page number based on page
number from triplet: The page number extracted from TOC
as a part of triplet might not be the exact page number. As
physical page number might be different from logical page
number. So we cannot rely only on the page number to look
for the exact match. It requires intelligently finding out the
page with matching text.
2. Extracting meaningful content from PDF: In PDF format,
content is stored in the form of glyph and there is no notion
of line, paragraph etc. In order to match content of TOC title
within the page content, we need to extract contents, one line
at a time which helps in identifying entries spanned across
multiple lines. iText API, which we used in our
implementation, extracts text but not in line formats. We use
positional information of text extracted to form lines in our
algorithm.
3. Variations in TOC entries and corresponding actual
entries in a page: Apart from the exact matches, there are
other cases which are quite interesting. (i) In some cases,
only chapters are associated with the division numbers, while
the subsections are not associated with the division numbers.
(ii) There are cases, where the actual entry corresponding to
the TOC, spans across multiple lines. For e.g.: “Introducing
AWT, Windows…” could actually span two or more lines
which needs to be matched exactly.
4. Discarding entries which are not candidates for
bookmarks: Sometimes, TOC title may appear multiple
times inside the document. For example, in many books page
header contains chapter title which exactly matches with
TOC title (of an entry) for a chapter. Obviously, all those
occurrences are not candidates for the bookmark target for
that TOC entry.
5. Finding exact position of a matching entry: Once we find
an exact match, next step is to find position of matching
entry in a page. If actual content is present in multiline then
we need to get the position of the first match of the substring
of TOC title. Once we have found exact match as well as
position for the same, we can create bookmarks that link to
specific position within a page.
4. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
4.1 System Architecture
Extract TOC triplet Target PDF
<Division, Title, with
Source Page number>
PDF bookmarks
Create Bookmarks
Figure 13: System Architecture of BOOKY
It consists of two modules: 1) Extract TOC Triplets 2) Create
Bookmarks. The input to tool and output from tool is both PDF
documents. Tool is implemented in Java. Open source library
iText [http://itextpdf.com] is used to extract text from PDF. It is
an open source library, with good documentation. Any other tool
can be used to extract the text. iText retrieves the text and the
images as per the order present in the PDF, which is useful during
both the extraction of TOC and the creation of bookmarks. The
proposed algorithm is presented in plain english.
Extract TOC Entries:
1. Extract content of a book one page at a time
2. For each page, extract content line by line : Forming a
line: iText gives glyph information for extracted text. For
PDF co-ordinates are like graph where origin is at left-
bottom corner. We form line by content having same y-
co-ordinate.
3. To check start of TOC, check if line contains:
a) Matching regex pattern for TOC like "Content"
b) If it matches, then find out if it has other pattern like
"table", "of" only and not something else
c) It could be detailed TOC, if it satisfies the condition.
i) Has the Triplet pattern throughout the page
d) Store the first item of the TOC in a global variable
e) For TOC candidate, divide line in the group of 3
Division: section no which is not present in all the
books in which case it's left blank; Title: chapter or section
name; Page No: Page no
f) Add triplet entry into a file
4. The end of TOC is identified when matching entry of the
global variable is encountered. An Enhancement, to
check for pattern in subsequent pages is on. If subsequent
page do not have pattern (dots, spaces, dash) which is
available in TOC then assume end of TOC.
5. Stop, when the condition in line 4 satisfies.
Create Bookmarks:
1. Retrieve triplets one by one formed from above step.
2. Retrieve title from triplet and page no
3. Start search from the given page no if it's a proper
numeric entry or else from page 1. Search for matching
entry for 'title' in triple by searching line by line.
4. Check for multiline title while matching TOC entry: If
entire line is part of triple 'title' then check for subsequent
line for remaining part of TOC 'title', continue until we
get full match or we get unmatched entry. Also during
this process store position of the first matching entry
which will be used for creating bookmarks that links to
particular position.
5. If it's a single line entry keep track of position of it.
6. Use bookmark creation feature with stored positions.
 The output is a PDF with bookmarks pointing to exact location of header then some intelligence is required to discard those
titles present in TOC. Challenges involved in extraction of TOC entries (e.g., as a part of decorative element).
entries and in creation of bookmarks are discussed in detail in
section 4; are implemented in Booky. There are a few open issues 6. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
in this context, which will be discussed in section 5. Tool was The automatic bookmark creation in e-books using the TOC
tested with over 2000 bookmarks spanning across several books entries are discussed at length in this paper. The approach here is
in PDF format. The results are tabulated in Table 1. novel and has significant advantages, that the extracted TOC
Table 1. Results of bookmark creation using TOC entries entries could be used for extracting different parts of the book
with the use of bookmarks. Bookmarks will give the exact
Correctly
No.of Correctly location of the content, which could be used in the extraction of a
extracted
Book TOC created Errors particular Chapter / Section / Sub-section of an e-book.
TOC
entries bookmarks Apart from this, these could be guide to extract the structure
entries
Book 1 781 696 696 5 (0.6%) information and extraction of hierarchy in e-books (e.g.,
Book 2 398 393 393 5 (1.2%) ChapterSectionSub-section). Various challenges involved are
Book 3 279 278 278 1 (0.3%) discussed at detail. Solutions to the challenges identified were
demonstrated using a PDF-specific tool named Booky. The
Book 4 72 71 71 1 (1.3%)
solution however could be generalized for any digital format.
Book 5 375 373 373 2 (0.5%) Some relatively minor issues still are still open. However, we have
Book 6 178 166 166 12 (6.7%) been able to achieve about 98% success rate in the accurate
Total 2083 2057 2057 26 (1.2%) extraction and linking of bookmarks automatically.
The results indicate that almost 98% of the bookmarks were
created correctly using this approach. However, there are a few
open issues, which are discussed in next section. An analysis 7. REFERENCES
shows that failures were caused by erroneous extraction of TOC [1] S. Mandal, et al. “Automated detection and segmentation of
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