Batch download PDFs linked in PDFs?

October 21, 2016 8:23 AM

Need to download hundreds of PDFs, but they are linked in PDFs... Browser extensions can't auto-download them- what are my options?

I've been provided with links to PDFs hosted online. Each document has dozens of PDFs linked on Dropbox within. I need to download them all and I'd like to do it without clicking through each one.

In the past, I've used browser extensions to auto-download all PDFs on a currently open web page. This doesn't work with the PDF doc. I don't have access to the owner's Dropbox and the owner cannot grab the files and zip them up for me. Is there an easy solution?

Thank you!

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

The quickest solution I can think of would be to convert the PDFs to HTML so that the links are preserved and then use your usual method. I would personally do it with acrobat if you have it but I don't know whether the free version supports that. There are a lot of free online ways to do this (google search). I'd do some vetting though, some of them look sketchier than others.

That's the hacky solution. There are probably better ways to do this if you can deal with the command line or python, such as this tool ("PDFx - Extract references and metadata from PDF documents, and download all referenced PDFs").
posted by advil at 8:47 AM on October 21, 2016

The best and easiest solution would be for the owner to share the Dropbox folder with you. This is a dead simple process. You haven't said why this isn't a possibility.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:43 AM on October 21, 2016