Firefox PDF.JS feature is sorely lacking in standard PDF features, and for some reason that project was never completed.

What PDF Reader has bookmarks? Not something that I recall seeing in the 3 PDF apps that I have used over the years.

your pdf viewer shows bookmarks, came in cleanly when I opened pdf created in Adobe

your pdf viewer shows bookmarks, came in cleanly when I opened pdf created in Adobe

I don't understand which kind of export you are looking for.

(1) PDF bookmarks

PDF files can contain a list of pairs of labels and page numbers that (optionally) appear in the left sidebar of the PDF viewer. Here's an example:

Firefox Search Bar Show Engine Names (Firefox 43) _20171004.pdf

If you hover the link and look at the status bar message, you can see that the bookmark has a # followed by some data used to navigate within the viewer. This may or may not bear any relation to what the bookmark data looks like in the original PDF because Firefox is re-rendering it to HTML.

I'm not aware of a way to export that list. Since it is HTML, there may be a way to use a script to extract the bookmark text and that data after the internal URL, but I'm not aware of such a script "out there" (and Firefox add-ons are not allowed to inject scripts into the PDF viewer so you would need to run it by hand in the Web Console).

(2) Firefox bookmarks

You can save bookmarks in Firefox, which are pairs of names and URLs. Some of those URLs might be to .pdf files, but Firefox doesn't have any selective export of its own bookmarks, so you would get the whole file. See: Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks.

As a workaround, you could try this:

Open the Library window using either:

• Ctrl+Shift+b
• "Open All Bookmarks"

In the search box at the upper right, type or paste the file extension .pdf and pause while Firefox searches and displays a list.

Click (single-click, not double-click) the first bookmark in the list, then press Ctrl+s to "Select All".

Now you can copy (Ctrl+c or right-click > Copy) the list and paste it into a text editor.

Does that help?

MarkBerry said

your pdf viewer shows bookmarks, came in cleanly when I opened pdf created in Adobe

I wonder if you are referring to Thumbnails of the pages in the PDF document that can be shown on the left side, like in a "sidebar".

correct, they are used to navigate the document, appear in sidebar. In adobe, they are referred to as bookmarks. Would like to export "thumbnails", ideally back to word file

If talking, Pdf and Word your in the wrong forum.

Power Point

If I right-click > Copy Image on a thumbnail in the left column of Firefox's PDF viewer, then paste into Word 2010, I don't get anything. The image is a "data URI" that browsers understand, but Word doesn't. Unless your version of Word can handle it, then you'll need to generate individual page thumbnails in some other way. There are a lot of tools for working with PDFs, so hopefully you'll find one without too much difficulty.