Batch creation of bookmarks (Windows)

Question

There is another thread on this for Apple users, one year old, but without an asnwer (except for something in the line of "not possible"), so:
I have got several hundred pages in tree structure, from a 2-pane "outliner"; technically, I'm able to have coded the items in the "tree" (= titles) by their respective "indentation", so if there is item1 with 0 tree indentation, I could automate putting some "$0" before that line, and similar for any other titles, "$1", "$2" and so on, or any other coding.
Also, I am able to export the whole formatted text body, from the outliner to various formats, e.g. in html coding, and then it would be possible to import them into InDesign, and then, from InDesin into Acrobat: Here, the tree structure would not be just a text file with several hundred lines, but there would be a structure like
title line or $3title line
then many lines of text body
$2title line
and again many lines of text body
and so on
which means it would be possible to "code" these title lines, separating the multiple "pages" (= items which then are bound to become pages within Acrobat/Pdf), in order to process them.
Do you have any "tips and tricks" to facilitate this, sparing me 15 hours of trial-and-error?
Is it necessary to include InDesign in this workflow, or are there scripts available that would enable Acrobat to "fetch" such coding from the text file?
Or then, in MS Word, what would to be done there in order for Acrobat to be able to process the Word file in a way that it (Acrobat) automatically rebuilt the tree structure?
I suppose my outliner codes could be transposed into respective headings within Word, but afterwards, Acrobat does NOT recognize those Word headings of different levels as Pdf "bookmarks"? So there would be the need to put "bookmarks" behind all Word title lines, by some Word macro?
And then, in Acrobat, those bookmarks would NOT be of multiple indentation levels (= no tree structure yet), but I would have a FLAT LIST there, to begin with, and from which then I would have to indent those bookmarks manually, one by one?
Alternative question: From my outliner, I am able to export the whole stuff into multiple other outliners; so the question arises if there is one outliner format, or one special export format from one outliner, that could be (more) easily processed further?
In the end, I have a tree structure within the outliner (and which, as said, could be exported separately, too, in order to be processed by macros/scripts), AND I want the same tree structure in the Pdf again, so there should be some way to straigthen this out?
Is there any documentation about Acrobat "scripting" or such, in order to prepare the necessary codes which then would be "readable" by Acrobat?
In the end, it seems to me that technically, Acrobat does NOT build up a real tree structure but for the navigation, but all those pages (all referenced by bookmarks) are processed as a flat list there. So the only "remaining" problem seems to be, how to "import" / replicate the outliner tree structure, and only that (= several hundred lines, without the text body), into the respective Acrobat navigation pane, and to have "outgoing" bookmarks there which reference the respective "incoming" bookmarks in those several hundred respective "pages" - this should be possible to automate in an earlier stage, by inserting the respective codes, in the tree file, and in the text body file.
For an example, the freeware TreePad-to-Pdf is able to create, from your TreePad tree, a respective Pdf tree, so, in theory, if you get your stuff into TreePad (which is very often possible and even easy, since the TreePad format is a common "exchange" format in the outliner "world"), you'll get it into pdf, as was your original tree.
Unfortunately, this freeware does loose any pictures (if you don't have many pictures in your brochure, you could re-insert them after building the Pdf tree, of course), and does loose any text formatting, which of course is totally unacceptable (and there is not any paid version of this tool that would not) - but this tool "proves", if such proof was necessary, that it's perfectly possible to replace the "tree coding" of your outliner with an according, automatic bookmarks creation for Acrobat/Pdf (note that in this example, Acrobat was not even necessary, I just opened the file then within Acrobat in order to see which way I could then process it further).
Thus my question, how are these "codes for creating pdf bookmarks, both ways (outgoing from tree, ingoing into the "pages")" available, in order to try to make Acrobat then import e.g. a html file in which these codes would have been put beforehand (and in which text formatting would be coded by html codes, that then hopefully would properly be processed by Acrobat on import)?
Perhaps an export of the outline to MS Word is necessary, then Acrobat PDFMaker will translate the different heading levels in Word into a respective tree structure within Acrobat; this is technically feasible. But I am looking out for a less cumbersome solution, something more straightforward.

Answer 1

Thank you all so much for your kind and highly constructive help, which is extremely useful for me!
Sabian, the term "Windows" is in the title, and under the title, I mentioned "System: Windows". But it has been with utmost interest that I followed your link; in the meantime, I had search for "InDesign add-on/add-in", but it didn't occur to me that for Acrobat, searching for add-ins/ons would also bring some results! Even on that very same page, there are lots of (paid) add-ins/ons, but if you recurrently have a standard problem some 200$ software can resolve, that might not be too expensive. So I'm very thankful for this new and brilliant idea to trial out Acrobat add-ins.
Bill and Gilad D, thank you very much for the info and the link (I'll look further for other links, too, now) - of course, it's a little bit frightening that the SDK API reference has got almost 800 pages, but that only shows how much is possible (when in fact with "naked" Acrobat Prof. I got the impression that "almost nothing" is possible!). I don't know JavaScript up to now, but I know some other scripting languages, and JS is so important today that this is a very good "occasion" to finally "learn" at least some of JS, and I will do this... which will probably lessen my need for paid add-ins... ;-) So I'm very thankful for this info how to "script" Acrobat. (Please excuse my "laziness" (or in fact, not having got the idea, to begin with!) to not google for "Acrobat scripting" before stupidly asking!)
LoriAUC, you said, "you might try first tagging your PDF file". From what I see, and from help/web, it seems this automatic tagging of the whole document will not only tag pages, but many other elements, too, which means that afterwards, I'll have to eliminate, by hand, hundreds if unwanted tags, since I just want the several hundred pages to be tagged (= bookmarked, then), but not paragraphs, sub-titles and so on. But as I said, I always have the idea in my head to insert special characters into the outliner output file, which then would appear in the pdf, and then tagging just these special characters (and then deleting them) would be an idea for scripting at least; as said, what Acrobat can do "on its own", from the controls it offers to the user, is not that much. But thank you so much for your idea! (Of course, if after automatic tagging, there was a command available to "delete all tags except for the page tags", this idea would become highly useful in real life, too!)
In fact, I have got that problem that from my outliner, html export (and text export) is flawless, but rtf export is unreliable (it leaves out text passages and doubles others, which it does neither in text nor in html export, I checked several times (and several such files) with a text compare tool), which means that the usual workflow Word (or in my case, import into Word), then do some tweaking there, then have things already done (or facilitated in Acrobat) when the file gets into Acrobat, would not be that smart in my case, since html import in Word is not that reliable either, and there are some paid "translation" tools for this task which perhaps don't preserve the formatting in any instance, or such things, and I simply cannot check visually every some weeks, for the same text body of several hundred pages, with just some pages added or altered or placed in other positions within that text body.
I also must say that the non-display of the item that is selected in the tree, and the necessary pressing of "Enter" to do this, as well as the absence of a keyboard shortkey for switching between tree and content, and vice versa, are both BIG FLAWS in pdf for screen use, and I think it's unacceptable that Adobe never did anything to overcome these flaws - we're speaking of version 11 of some ubiquitous software here!
So at this time, I'm also looking out for html possibilities (which also permit 2-column text, as pdf does), and especially for so-called "treeview controls", which are available free and paid, and as I see, here I have similar problem with "Enter" (or the mouse) needed to display content, but here at least, I suppose I could program (after finding and learning the respective commands that is) that "wait for 0.3 sec if user further navigates, but when he stops navigating, show content of current item" command, since within html, and especially with JS, many such things are possible from what I know.
Similarly for the switching between tree and content: JS must be running anyway, for the tree control, so it's possible to assign, in JS, key commands for things that on regular websites necessitate the mouse.
Btw, I briefly considered this for pdf, after reading Acrobat scripting was done by JS - but then, it seems that there is no way to have a JS script running on a pdf, IN RUNTIME - or then, most users' system would warn "there is a JS script launched by this pdf, do you want it really to run?" And of course, people would negate this question, and problably close down the pdf immediately - whilst some JS in html code is widely accepted, right?
So I'm evaluating pdf against its "competitors" here, and I conclude pdf for SCREEN use is far from being as good as it could be - or do I overlook tweaking possibilies?
Then, from html (with css and JS), I would prefer to have exported that into Flash, in order to have some protection at least for my content - on the other hand, good screen "rendering", good screen "visuals", are more important to me than is text protection (so here again, pdf "looses" in comparison even to html).
So at this point in time, I don't know yet what I will do, but I'll begin with learning JS basics, and then will check this 800-pages document for what would really be possible with Acrobat, before taking a possible decision against it.
This being said, any additional info, hint, idea, consideration would be more than welcome, but as said, I'm very thankful to all of you for your kind help and interest in this matter!