I wrote a Python program that parses Preview.app‘s bookmarks. The program itself is probably of dubious use, but it illustrates some interesting techniques like using class-dump to figure out how programs written in Objective-C work and how to use PyObjC to write Cocoa-style code with Python.

https://github.com/msabramo/print_os_x_preview_app_bookmarks

PyObjC allows you to write Python code that access the Cocoa libraries in a fairly intuitive way. The trickiest part of writing the program was figuring out how the data archived in the plist file was archived, so that I could write code to unarchive it. How did I figure out what the data looks like?

1. Install class-dump.

$ brew install class-dump

2. Run it (The awk is just to filter the output to show just the PVBookmark class).

$ class-dump /Applications/Preview.app | awk '/@interface PVBookmark/, /@end/ { print; }'
@interface PVBookmark : NSObject
{
    NSString *_UUID;
    NSString *_parentUUID;
    PVFileReference *_file;
    NSDate *_fileModDate;
    NSString *_label;
    int _pageIndex;
}

- (id)initWithFilePath:(id)arg1 label:(id)arg2 pageIndex:(unsigned long long)arg3;
- (void)dealloc;
- (id)initWithCoder:(id)arg1;
- (void)encodeWithCoder:(id)arg1;
- (id)description;
- (id)UUID;
- (id)filePath;
- (id)fileModificationDate;
- (id)label;
- (void)setLabel:(id)arg1;
- (unsigned long long)pageIndex;
- (id)targetExists;
- (BOOL)targetIsOnNetworkVolume;
- (id)displayPath;
- (unsigned long long)pageNumber;

@end