How to strip out leading numbers in auto-generated bookmarks?

Question

For years now my team has used an Acrobat plug-in called Compose, which lets us strip out the leading numbers from bookmarks in PDFs generated from FrameMaker 7.2. (The tool works after the fact, so that all bookmark creation occurs after the PDF is created.)
For example, these document headings:
1.1 Intro to Happy Fun Ball
1.1.1. System Requirements
1.1.2. Cautionary Information (WARNING)
are translated to the bookmarks:
Intro to Happy Fun Ball
System Requirements
Cautionary Information (WARNING)
After evaluating the new Adobe Tech Comm Suite, it seems that Acrobat 9 Extended Pro isn't compatible with the Compose plug-in (or at least, the version we've been using for years).
Does anyone know if there's a method -- built into either FrameMaker 8 or Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, or in an SDK -- that allows you to auto-generate bookmarks but strip out leading numbers? It seems this is a no-brainer of a feature, yet I can't find it listed anywhere in the Acrobat documentation.
Other names for this feature might be "wild card" or "text masking," not to mention "strip leading numbers."
Thanks very much for your help.
Regards,
Buster

Answer 1

The following code can be run from the JavaScript console, but since you're new to this, it might be easier to create a button, paste the code shown below into the Mouse Up event of the button, select the Hand tool and click the button to execute the code, and then delete the button if everything is OK.
If you need to do this a lot, you should consider setting up a custom menu item or toolbar button that executes this code:
function removeBookmarkPrefix(bookmark) {
    // Resursive function to remove bookmark prefix
    // Rename bookmark without prefix
    bookmark.name = bookmark.name.replace(/^\S+\s+/, "");
    if (bookmark.children != null) {
        for (var i = 0; i < bookmark.children.length; i++) {
            removeBookmarkPrefix(bookmark.children[i]);
// Remove all bookmark prefixes, recursively
removeBookmarkPrefix(bookmarkRoot);
The code uses what's called a regular expression, which in this case is fairly simple: /^\S+\s+/
This regular expression means to search the bookmark name for the beginning of the string (^), followed by one or more non-whitespace characters (\S+), followed by one or more white space characters (\s+), and replace all that with an empty string (""), thus removing it. This should work with the bookmark name prefixes you describe.
The function is called recursively, which is an efficient way to handle the hierarchical structure that the bookmark tree can have.
If you get stuck, post again.
George