DDP to GeoPDF - layer name/rename?

[ToddMorken]

I have a series of 30 topo basemaps with various data layers I've created a DDP layout for, and it appears to export fine to a single pdf and the layers are there without issues. 

However, when viewing in adobe and selecting the layer tab, it displays 30 drop downs all with the same XXXXXXX.tmp file heading, all of which contain the exact same layers.  It seems it created a new tab for every page, which seems redundant, but adobe allows you to only view the current page layerset, so that provides a band aid type fix.

Is there any way to rename all those XXXXXX.tmp file headings in Acrobat, or better yet an option so that when DDP exports to a geopdf that it uses the index page name (in this case the topo quad names) instead of 30 instances of an identical random tmp file name?   I tried looking at various settings for the DDP or arcpy.mapping script functions but didn't see anything that looked like it would accomplish this.

Thanks in advance

[JeffBarrette]

These names are being generated internally by the Adobe library based on the name of the "single" PDF file name.  There is nothing that can be done using this approach.

I think the best workaround is to automate this using arcpy.mapping:

1) export each DDP page as a single page (using page name or page number as the identifier).
2) Use PDFDocumentCreate to generate each a new PDF.
3) Append the pages from step 1 in to the new PDF.
4) saveAndClose() the final PDF.
5) delete single PDFs from step 1
6) open in Adobe and the pages should appear as you want.

The other work around is to manually rename the tmp files using Adobe Pro.

Jeff

[ToddMorken]

Jeff,

Thanks!  That might be the best solution and easily allows us to edit a single page of the batch.  We've found that for whatever reason the batch PDF export tends to give us some interesting results, for example on this set of 30, 4-5 pages had to be re-exported because of glitches in the export process creating odd pdf symbol artifacts and lables being cut off, when exported individually they were fine.

The other method I found that works is if you use the map export GUI for the data driven pages but ask it to make a seperate PDF for each page, and specify the page name as part of the file, then the file name shows up as the tab in the PDF instead of a temp file.  The problem we've discussed with that is, the export glitches seem somewhat random so we can't rely on a 30 page one time export being correct without making changes to a page here and there, and if we re-run the export pages that were okay might have new glitches. 

Since we can manually rename them in Adobe pro, that might be our best option that lets us edit/tweak pages as needed and still be able to avoid having 30 XXXXX.tmp files show up.

Thanks!

[JohnSobetzer]

Since you have Adobe Pro, I would think the easiest thing to do is export to individual pdfs using DDP, which will give you the opportunity to get meaningful file names.  Then you can use Adobe's Combine - Merge Files Into a Single Pdf to create one "binder" pdf with bookmarks and layers with those names.

If you didn't like the DDP output file names there is an excellent free file renamer simply called Bulk Rename Utililty.exe that can be used after export to quickly change the pdf file names prior to combining.  The binder also makes it very easy to check all your pdfs for errors, and if you find some after exporting individual fixes, you can either repeat the binder process and create a new one with the corrected pdfs, or use Adobe's  Document - Replace Pages to fix the Binder file.  I typically apply the PDF Optimizer and sometimes other post processing on the Binder at this point.