When we run Adobe Acrobat training courses in London, one of the first topics we tackle is bookmarks. Almost everyone will agree that PDFs are a great invention but it can sometimes be rather tedious to navigate through them. That’s where bookmarks become useful: they are clickable headings which take you to a specific part of the PDF document and allow you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or paging.
If you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to ensure that your audience can access key facts as quickly as possible. Adding a few bookmarks to your PDF files can add value to them by making them more attractive to potential clients.
The bookmarks panel is one of Acrobat’s navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To make bookmarks visible, click on the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. Clicking on a bookmark will move you to the page that it links to.
Acrobat Reader cannot be used to create PDFs: you will need either Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, the commercial versions of Acrobat. But then you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF anyway.
Having created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Then navigate to the first page that you want your readers to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu located in the top right of the Bookmarks panel. Finally, enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you want.
If this all sounds a bit tedious then let’s look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, instead of typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to highlight some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the highlighted text will be used as the name of the bookmark. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark: Control-B.
You can also generate bookmarks automatically. For example, there is Adobe PDFMaker. This handy utility is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates an extra menu in all Microsoft Office programs called “Adobe PDF”. It also creates an “Adobe PDFMaker” toolbar.
When you create a PDF using the PDFMaker utility, any text formatted with Word’s heading styles (”Heading 1″, “Heading 2″, etc.) will automatically be converted to PDF bookmarks as will entries in indexes and tables of content. Similarly, if you PDF an Excel workbook using PDFMaker, bookmarks to each worksheet will automatically be created. In PowerPoint, bookmarks to each slide in your presentation will be generated for you.
The major DTP packages will also automatically create PDF bookmarks based on styles, indexes and tables of content), in much the same way as Word. This applies to QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. If you own one of these three software applications, you don’t actually need to have a copy of Acrobat to create your PDF files, since this capability is built-in to each of these brilliant programs.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that bookmarks only be used to link to a particular page within the PDF document. (They can do tons of other things as well.) In any case, they actually link to a view not a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your PDF file contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and create a bookmark of that view. When your user clicks the bookmark, he or she will be taken to the zoom level that was current when you created the bookmark.